In the talk, we share insights from our practice-based experimentation with ‘feral’ ways of making sense with multispecies landscapes and dataflows. Drawing on our ongoing research collaboration with the Křivoklátsko forest in Central Bohemia, we discuss how feral ways – open-ended, spontaneous, messy, welcoming indeterminacy – may foster more-than-human co-creation of knowledge and data, and nurture shifts from anthropocentric ‘making sense of’ to relational ‘making sense-with’ other-than-human creatures.
Our research is often performative and embodied, taking the shape of, for instance, experimental walks or drifts (or dérives, following Debord, 1958) that invite local dwellers and inhabitants – pine trees, squirrels, dogs, storks, lichen, humans – to explore and understand local landscapes. While walking (crawling, floating, drifting, or otherwise moving) together with these participants, we pay attention to our surroundings, guided by each others’ sense of orientation and interests as well as spontaneous chance encounters. On the way, we exchange conversations (verbal or otherwise), gather sensory impressions, and record traces in diverse formats: sounds, videos, scribbles, sniffs, or simple acts of remembering. The data emerging from such experiential inquiries where knowledge is embodied and felt, often materialises beyond dominant data norms – of structured, measurable, reproducible, or clearly codable units of information – as artifacts and experiences open for engagement through sensory, emotional, and tacit perception.
Reflecting on our recent (often failed) attempts to share this work within broader academic contexts, we illustrate how experimenting with ferality can foreground issues of power, agency, and control in the currently human-centric discourses around data, technology, and sensemaking in eco-social transformation efforts.
Markéta Dolejšová (https://materie.net) is a practice-based researcher experimenting with embodied and sensory experiences in multispecies contexts. Her recent focus has been on ferality and feral eco-systems, exploring what relations, intuitions, and ways of knowing can emerge in the liminal spaces between the wild and the domesticated, the familiar and unknown, the serendipitous and intentional. She is also an Assistant Professor at The Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where she acts as the Head of Doctoral Research Department, and recently finished her postdoctoral research fellowship at Aalto University – School of Arts, Design and Architecture (2020-24). In 2020-22, she worked with the CreaTures – Creative Practices for Transformational Futures project, where she led the Laboratory of Experimental Productions and co-created the CreaTures Framework proposing how creative practices can stimulate action towards socially and ecologically sustainable futures. She has co-founded several art-design research initiatives including the Uroboros festival, the Open Forest Collective, and the Feeding Food Futures network. Since 2025, she’s been co-directing the ABIS – Ars Biologica Independent Studies, an international platform connecting experimental art, design, technology and science with a focus on perma~culture thinking. Her work has appeared in academic outlets and cultural venues such as the Venice Architecture Biennale, Helsinki Design Week, ArtScience Museum Singapore, National Museum of Scotland, and National Gallery Prague.
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