In this workshop, participants will be tasked with: painting yoghurt on food safe butter paper; pegging it to a line, to dry; addressing an envelope to someone with whom they wish (or imagine) co- creating culture; adding a note, poem or desire, and yoghurt-making instructions that poetically detail the microbial and environmental meeting and making, noting what elements can (seemingly) be controlled, and what depend on the environment / living ecosystem. While enacting the instructions, participants will be guided through a reflective discussion on making culture by making yoghurt. Considerations will include whether co-creation with microbes is, indeed, possible, and how humans – in our multispecies complexity – might commune with microscopic creatures as we make cultures. To expand beyond the bounds of the workshop, participants will be provided with yoghurt starter-cultures and invited to take these into their lives beyond the conference; to document their growth through a variety of means, and develop and share multispecies-/sensory-/auto- ethnographic reflections on the process with other workshop participants, as a form of gift-giving. This gift-giving process will introduce yoghurts with shared microbial cultures into the participants’ diverse and particular cultural milieu, to hopefully make tangible impacts of differing contextual interactions, by re-merging them virtually in a form of more-than-human, complexly embodied culture-making. The method contributes to research into multisensory ways of understanding and exploring matters of engagement, offering experiential/embodied pathways between material practice and reflective inquiry. We welcome participation from conference attendees interested in sensory, multispecies and materials approaches to the cultivation of culture(s). We look forward to forming alliances for future work. Length of workshop: 60 minutes

Keywords: embodied design, digesting, cultures, imaginaries, multi-species co-creation