How do water organisms register and reveal complex meaning in relation to river health? How can environmental data be both sensible and sensuous? What fieldwork is required when you cannot access, see or hold that which is being studied?

Sensitives Stream is an online project by Matterlurgy (Helena Hunter and Mark Peter Wright) that shares research and practice from their residency with Arts Catalyst as part of Test Sites. The project highlights the importance of river dwelling organisms and how their presence or absence indicates broader stories in relation to ecosystems, environmental stress and human activity. Located along the waterways of the River Calder and Aire in Castleford, West Yorkshire (UK), the website unfolds materials from the residency as an online encounter, combining elements of site-based and remote fieldwork, watery media and critical poetics.

The website offers three distinct journeys: you are invited to (1) dive into the river with two organisms, Caddisfly Larva and Sludge Worm; (2) flow with a collection of text scores; and (3) dwell by listening to audio chapters about the process of cross-disciplinary fieldwork.

The project reveals river organisms as both sensitive indicators of change and world-making actors that perform sentience and knowledge in ways that exceed the human. Topics relating to art and science methods, the production and analysis of data, as well as industrial pasts and chemical futures, interlink throughout the site. 

Matterlurgy worked with environmental scientists Prof. Philip Warren and Prof. Lorraine Maltby, from the Department of Animal and Plant Sciences at the University of Sheffield to understand how river ecosystems are studied. This collaboration involved sharing research methods and approaches, fieldwork and data interpretation.

The digital site was co-developed with Neo-Metabolism, a planetary research and design practice. In collaboration, immersive raw media feeds were adapted into various formats, so that the project can be streamed through many channels.

Sensitives Stream has been commissioned as part of Arts Catalyst’s Test Sites co-inquiry, through which, since 2017, Arts Catalyst has been working with artists, anthropologists and stakeholders from the Calder region to collectively examine water governance and its relationship with health, wellbeing and the resilience of communities and environments. You can find out more about the residency via Arts Catalyst’s website here.

To access the platform visit Sensitives Stream.