With the aid of some tools and a lot of creative license, participants were encouraged to imagine, explore, and record their experience of the Vera List Courtyard through the sensory worlds of a rat, a pigeon, and an ivy plant. Socio-ecolgoical praxis is the framework applied to this participatory project, prompting participants to reflect on how entering the imagined worlds of other beings expanded their worldview and the significance of this expanded awareness for our collective urban futures.

multispecies portrait: integrating imagined ultraviolet vision of rats and pigeons by collaborator Ezgi Eyigor

multimedia collage: archival image of the courtyard, image of red maple tree trunk, rubbing of tree trunk, and self-portrait by collaborator Ezgi Eyigor

This online orientation prepares human participants in the Lovely, Ordinary, Strange activation to enter the Vera List Courtyard with an expanded historical and sensorial understanding of the space. We acknowledge the land politically designated as New York City to be the homeland of the Lenape long before the arrival of European settlers. We go over the Western conception of humans as distinct from and superior to Nature and the concept of Umwelt as undermining this legacy. Umwelt, the German word to encompass the unique sensory world a being experiences and inhabits. We use this term to frame conversations around why multispecies exploration is relevant to urban futures and how this will be integrated into the practical application.