What does it mean to observe art? What senses can be brought to bear when we experience the early stage process of art making? What does fieldwork mean for theorists, philosophers, scholars, and art practitioners?
The Second Order group has a different working model than rest of the Field_Notes – The North Escaping groups. It is composed of journalists, artists and anthropologists who will embedded themselves into the other groups with the aim to document their work, gain insight into their approaches and offer counter perspectives. The aim is to critically look at the groups methods and practises of the field, which might include the encouragement to step out of predefined schemes or even to violate traditional field norms in order to experiment with new ideas.
The group will focus on observation, foster awareness of emerging practices and will assist in learning from one another. In order to study and intervene in the other groups, Second Order will employ various inventive methods and pilot new ideas. The Second Order group has always been important and instrumental to each Field_Notes edition.
Second Order will deploy tools from anthropology, ethnography, philosophy and art to serve as 'social glue' between the often disconnected groups. They are inter-group facilitators, documentarists, intellectual sparring partners and instigators.
The group member include Jonathan Carruthers-Jones, Elsa Ferreira, Teemu Lehmusruusu and Roger Norum.
Jonathan Carruthers-Jones works as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Cultural Anthropology, University of Oulu, Finland. He is currently focused on the CONTOURS project, which is a multidisciplinary research project looking at impacts of tourism on wilderness areas using walking methods for research interviews, and ecoacoustics. His research is focused on understanding the complex issues which surround human-nature interactions and how they relate to the long-term success of conservation, especially in wild places.
A journalist for the past ten years, Elsa Ferreira specializes in technology and culture. With Makery, she has been exploring hacker and maker culture and the meeting of arts and sciences for over 8 years. As part of the Rewilding Cultures program, she travels to Summer Camps all over Europe to observe and report on what goes on in these wilderness labs. An enthusiast of counter-cultures, she observes and deciphers the impact of technology on society. She is a regular contributor to magazines such as Pour l'Éco and L'ADN.
Teemu Lehmusruusu is a transdisciplinary artist based in Helsinki and Kemiönsaari. His practice spans across hybrid interfaces between digital technologies, research-based art and architectural thinking in a quest to create experiential embodiments of biological phenomena that are otherwise inaccessible to human senses. Lehmusruusu re-considers the concept of landscape from an alternative angle, from below and within its volumes, through the agencies residing in it. His work has in recent years encompassed artistic research related to soil ecosystems, undertaken within a network built around a project-platform entitled Trophic Verses. The works are created in interaction with regenerative agriculture practitioners and farmers as well as climate and soil scientists. Lehmusruusu is currently working on his doctoral thesis at the Department of Art and Media at Aalto University.
Roger Norum is an anthropologist based at the University of Oulu, Finland, where he co-directs the Biodiverse Anthropocenes research programme. He has disciplinary experience spanning geography, media studies and the environmental humanities. He is interested in links between infrastructure, mobility and the environment, and focuses in his research on the comparative and praxeological dimensions of media and migration, primarily among transient communities in the Arctic and South/East Asia. Roger is currently working in one project about the experience and imagination of silence in the North, and another on the social lives of mosquitoes in Finland and Alaska.
Photo: Björn Kröger