1. WRITING A SONG FOR AIIA

In order to rearrange our relation to a living planet, writer Amitav Ghosh (2022: 84) urges us to sing and narrate all beings into life, and in so doing to learn from other cosmological understandings of the world. Singing as a tactile mode of active and responsive engagement in the world is also proposed by anthropologist Tim Ingold (2002). His notion of a ‘poetics of dwelling’ refers to songs and poetic storytelling as ways of ‘art’-full living, with art not understood as a way of representing the world but as a craft of attentive living in and resonating with the vibrant presence of other-than human beings. In this contribution, the authors join these calls to ‘re-wild our language’ and ‘to sing the landscape back into being, as well as to sing one’s being back into it’ (Macfarlane, 2016). They do so by sharing their experimental song writing that they developed ‘to sing into life’ two significant nonhuman others. This song writing originated in an Arts-Science collaboration with the Dutch experience design collective called Polymorf. They combined ethnography with AI technology and speculative design. The first song was written for a speculative fictional being, called AIIA: an AI-animated planetary director and artistic composer of poetic dwelling in a more-than-human world. The second was written for the Waal, the river flowing through the city of Nijmegen. For this river song the authors did instant experimental fieldwork on human-river relatedness in the setting of an urban arthouse. Based on the input received from the audience, they composed a part-song that will eventually be performed at the riverside to heal and enchant the river, as well as inspire AIIA’s multispecies knowledge. In this contribution the authors reflect on this arts-science-society collaboration, and how it evoked their creative writing in multispecies ethnography. This chapter includes ten visuals from Polymorf that were co-created with AI in the process of song writing.