More-than-Human Assembly is an interactive environment for cross-species deliberation and decision-making about taking action in response to the Climate Emergency.
More-than-Human Assembly
Work-in-progress, worldwide
More-Than-Human Assembly expands collective decision-making to include not only humans but also the voices of non-human species in an immersive interactive environment designed for cross-species deliberation and decision-making.
At a global scale, we are in a crisis of collective decision-making, with the concepts of democracy, identity, enfranchisement and citizenship under threat. Through this project, we aim to confront the limitations of contemporary governance systems and spaces that marginalise both vulnerable human populations as well as non-human entities – each disproportionally affected by top-down human decisions.
In the context of the on-going Climate Emergency, as AI challenges our understanding of non-human intelligence, and as countries worldwide experiment with giving personhood and citizenship to non-human species, it is essential to design new forms of multi-species governance, and new open environments for both humans and non-humans to make decisions together through novel paradigms of democracy and agency.
We are developing an immersive interactive environment for practising conversation and decision-making with non-human species through an inclusive Citizen Assembly for local communities, where humans and non-humans (represented via AI-driven anthropomorphised conversational interfaces developed with the community and inter-species communication experts, similar to our work on T(h)ree) can take votes on action in response to the Climate Emergency.
Immersive environment for cross-species discussion, deliberation & decision-making
Singing Trees, Paris, 2020
The project is the culmination of several years working on interfaces between humans and other species in cities.
1. Singing Trees (2020)
Singing Trees (with IRCAM, commissioned by Louvre Abu Dhabi & Theatre du Chatelet), explores people’s relationship to trees and climate in Paris and Abu Dhabi.
Highlighting the pressing need for environmental awareness in the age of climate change, Singing Trees combines innovative technology and music to engage with nature.
Activating the outdoor landscape, each tree is given a ‘voice’ using electronic belts attached to each tree that enable the trees to sing together as a choir in response to the audiences’ interaction with the work. As visitors move closer to the trees, the choir becomes louder and more synchronised.
See video of Singing Trees in Abu Dhabi and Paris.
2. Re:Wild Royal Docks (2021)
Re:Wild Royal Docks (with EdenLab and the Borough of Newham), is a 10-year vision for ‘rewilding’ the East London Borough of Newham, by deploying new natural and technological infrastructures to upgrade the built environment and support deep community engagement and education.
Supported by the Eden Project, the strategic approach developed for Re:Wild Royal Docks combines greening of the urban landscape and improving biodiversity with a participatory approach to rewilding, getting people actively involved in making decisions about green spaces and systems, while getting them to feel a little 'wild' themselves.
The scheme includes a ‘Rewild Headquarters’ at Royal Albert Dock and instrumenting the surrounding landscape, non-human species and natural environments through sensor networks and monitoring stations, combining human, non-human and synthetic systems into a collective-intelligence infrastructure connected both to the on-site network as well as sensor networks and environments throughout the Borough.
View of Re:Wild HQ, image by Gort Scott
Participant creating empathy map of trees in More-than-Human Citizen Assembly, Parque Serralves, Porto, Portugal
3. More-than-Human Citizen Assembly Workshop (2023)
More-than-Human Citizen Assembly Workshop (with INOVA+ and Parque Serralves, Porto), explored decision-making with non-humans. Participants helped create 'empathy maps' of trees in a park and we then combined this subjective data with real-time and contextual data as subjective inputs into an AI/LLM.
Through this we were able to simulate conversations with the trees, their responses, opinions and decisions, take votes on collective action, and find out what they might think about the Climate Emergency, enabling us to hold a “Citizen Assembly” that included both human and non-human citizens.
Video of More-than-Human Citizen Assembly Workshop
4. RePlay: Reveries of an Urban Dreamland (2023)
In RePlay: Reveries of an Urban Dreamland (with Karachi Institute of Business Management & British Council), we helped support local artists and architects developing new interfaces between humans and non-humans in urban environments during 6-month R&D residency projects.
Pakistan-based participants explored how to design strategies for human and non-human interactions that would help reshape our cities into sustainable engines of survival, rather than socially-constricting, energy-intensive, and life-shortening systems they are now. Work focused on Karachi, already disproportionately affected by climate change.
The research culminated in a major roundtable event in Karachi in November 2023, showcasing resident researchers and key local guest speakers involved in urban environmental activism.
Collateral Damage, by Arsalan Nasir, part of RePlay
T(h)ree extending across a public park, merging ecological, technological and social networks
5. T(h)ree (2025)
Co-created with residents of Regent’s Park Estate, T(h)ree is a permanent landscape intervention in Central London, integrating community knowledge with natural infrastructure and AI technology to give ‘voice’ to a London Plane Tree that has witnessed hundreds of years of history, so people can talk with it and ask questions.
For more details, see the T(h)ree project webpage.
More-than-Human Assembly (work-in-progress)
Bringing this work together is our proposed Assembly, a real-world demonstration of how multi-species cooperation and governance might work.
While we humans are not yet able fully to understand non-human communication, much progress has been made in developing conversational interfaces (and understanding communication) for a broad range of non-human species. Yet we still aren’t sure what we might talk about, or what it means when we discover their personalities and opinions conflict with our own.
A key element is to explore the ethical implications of creating AI-driven anthropomorphised personas for non-human species, and how this relates to ‘representation’ as a political/democratic concept. Our previous work has shown that even when people know they aren’t actually talking with non-humans, it permanently transforms their relationship to them as beings, and holds a mirror to their engagement with the world.
Stay tuned for more, and drop us a line if you’d like to take part!
