Animal Senses in the Anthropocene

The mass of human-made things now exceeds the mass of natural things, a sign of our new Anthropocene age. This has introduced an array of sensory changes in animals’ perception of their natural climes. Human made structures now disrupt numerous animals’ flying behaviors, adding to the already disruptive human made light sources. Underwater boat motor sounds and radar pings interfere with not only underwater animal navigation and communication, and their associated turbulence destroys hard fought nesting and hiding sites. Increases in terrestrial and aquatic temperatures disrupt a range of behaviors as increases in salinity undermine prey-detection in fish. The focus of this talk is animal crossmodal perceptual abilities and their ability to mitigate natural and artificial changes. In “sensory switching” when one sense is blocked another can be used. However, in some animals crossmodal perception leads to distraction in all the senses when one sense is blocked. Hence, understanding crossmodal perception in animals may reveal mitigating strategies as well as novel kinds of harm from artificial changes through anthropogenic effects on the environment, having significance for animal survival, sustenance, and social adaptations to ecologies in our new Anthropocene age.

Keywords: pollution, animal perception, crossmodal perception, sensory switching, Anthropocene

Mike Cassidy (INDI/Design and Computation Arts, Concordia University)

Tactile Stigmergy: Ant-Inspired Strategies for Adaptive and Collective Sensory Design

Ants navigate and collaborate through tactile communication and stigmergy—indirect and often asynchronous coordination between agents via environmental modifications such as vibrational signals and pheromonal substrate markings. These decentralized systems are highly adaptive, relying on impermanent, multimodal sensory inputs to support collective problem-solving in novel contexts.

This paper details the researcher’s process of designing and building a modular formicarium for his personal ant caring practice, while exploring how stigmergic principles can inspire spatio-sensory design that prioritizes adaptability, participation, and accessibility. Ants’ reliance on multimodal and ephemeral cues suggests ways to design communicative, multisensory spaces that adapt dynamically to collective input. This paper will take a speculative approach, thinking about how the built environment–this time at a human scale–might facilitate collective practices of sensing and sense-based communication.

In particular, I will focus on haptic technologies–technologies of touch–as fundamental and inclusive modes of interaction. This entails thinking about how tactile markers might be integrated into public space, to create decentralized, community-driven communications networks. By embracing tactile and vibrational communication, I situate ants’ stigmergic strategies as powerful models for sensory-diverse design.

Keywords: Stigmergy, Multisensory Design, Adaptive Environments, Bioinspired Systems, Collaborative Interaction

Mark Paterson ∆ (Sociology, University of Pittsburgh, USA)

A Stroll Through the Perceptual Worlds of Animals and Men: Sensing Climate Crisis

The classic 1934 essay ‘A stroll through the worlds of animals and men’ by Jakob Von Uexküll remains fresh and is continually in print. What if we are able to stroll like this through more advanced digital technology, the better to glimpse the realities of more-than human sensation and perception when habitats are under threat? Uexküll's essay remains popular. First, it opens out the consideration of the senses beyond our anthropocentric limitations. The perceptual world of other species, based on different arrangements of senses, is endlessly fascinating. Second, it reveals not just the perceptual differences, but what is _shared_ between humans and nonhumans, that is, ‘interanimality’. As Merleau-Ponty remarks: “We study the human through its body in order to see it emerge as different from the animal, not by the addition of reason, but rather, in the _ineinander_ (intertwining) with the animal ...” (2003, 214). This is to considering a larger ecology of sensing beyond the individual human subject, what cultural geographers, anthropologists, and others consider a “more-than human world”, and what Donna Haraway (2007) conceives as “multispecies entanglements”. This paper explores such ideas through a series of case studies, intriguing artistic experiments that seek to escape the replication of human sensing through digital technologies, looking to nonhuman bodies and experiences for inspiration. Are such experiments a productive strategy for grasping the effects of climate change on nonhuman species?
Keywords: more-than human, ethology, climate change, digital sensation, animal perception