Chris Harris

From conflict to co-existence: the Cooperative guides audiences through collectively imagining human–orca mutual wellbeing within the Strait of Gibraltar and beyond, using bio-cultural mapping and design-futures to open space for a convivial blue economy.

Initiated with a micro-grant from the Collective Imagination Practice Community and grounded in a year of sustained relationship-building with sailors, conservation groups, mariners, and citizens living alongside the Strait, the work develops participatory workshops and an immersive presentation that hold both the ecological and the speculative. Both the practice and the Strait remain open.

A creative ecology intervention across citizen sensing, acoustic ecology, and augmented reality, Acoustic Gardens was commissioned by the Sovereign Nature Initiative following a first-prize Hackathon win, and launched to over 300 participants at De Ceuvel — Amsterdam's experimental phytoremediation site and ecological field station.

Developed with a team of ecologists, artists, and technologists, the work built a multiplayer mobile experience in which AI-powered birdsong classification turned collective field listening into shared ecological knowledge. The piece asks what it means to sense a place together, and what forms of attention that requires.

A speculative zine and coastal walk made for World Ocean Day, the project drew on the layered mythologies of the Pillars of Hercules to invite residents into a different relationship with their shoreline — offering movements, meditations, and narrative exercises written from the coast's ecological memory.

Eighty hand-distributed copies put the work directly into the hands of locals. An accompanying immersive digital publication — 3D scenes assembled from scanned ceramics, underwater footage, and record-sleeve graphic references — extended the work into a space between print and screen.

Invited by TBA21 to the Porto Design Biennial alongside fellow artist-activists, the project responded to the crisis of deep sea mining through collective making rather than protest. Working with marine scientists and social researchers, we prototyped rapid citizen assembly formats — democratic processes compressed into artistic experience, held in the same rooms where international policy was being debated.

The research became a poly-vocal choir: a scored, performed dissemination of our collective findings, later extended online as an interactive exercise in public reading and response.

How do you capture tacit knowledge without flattening it? Working with Foster Collective and ten creative peers, I framed a series of interviews within a speculative fiction: artifacts recovered from the 'Moon Circle kitchen collective', a future community whose written records had been intentionally destroyed. The constraint liberated something — participants spoke more freely, more poetically, about the nature of collaboration.

The resulting audio collage, released as a sold-out limited edition on Metalabel, is part documentary, part myth. Editing was itself a compositional act — weaving disparate voices into a single, polyvocal conversation that neither summarises nor resolves.

Organismo was a day-long experience score for a geographically distributed study group — designed to create what I call productive intimacy: the sense of being genuinely present with others across separation. Participants moved through their own local environments simultaneously, prompted via Telegram with instructions drawn from drift (dérive) practice and performance scoring.

The act of looking for the 'organismo' — specific patterns, presences, anomalies in each local ecology — created a layer of collective attention that transcended physical distance. The project lives in the gap between fieldwork and play, between ethnography and ritual.