Actor-Flower-Mesh-Work: making environments together

In this paper we use an Ingoldian ‘meshwork’ and a Latournian ‘actor network’ approach to unpack the complexities of devising and constructing complex situations that combine creativity and technology. To do this, we draw on our experience of creating and exhibiting an interactive installation. We draw on our observations of the interactions, relations and correspondences between the installation, its elements and the people that visited the space. We develop a discussion of these theories somewhat auto-ethnographically around the artwork Lichtsuchende, a group of robots with social behaviours enacted through light. Their trajectories of becoming are not that straightforward, and by looking at the moments of becoming we can delve into understanding the artwork better using two distinctive approaches: Ingold’s meshwork and Latour’s actor-network. The two approaches enable us to investigate from within and from outside. We seek to understand the ways in which these viewpoints can be applied as methodologies to unpack the factors involved in the creation of an artificial society and the emergence of a shared environment made of human and non-human things.