From enlightenment to enlivenment

We live on land where the energies of ancestors continue to enfold and enliven the spirits of everyday places, animating hard and soft matter and the air in between. Where the ground we dance on is the soil that knowing trees grew tall from. That is true whether we recognise it or not.

A place is not an empty backdrop on which we act. It is how we feel where we are. It is memory, sensation, a relationship, an act of care. It is the space that holds our lives together, unfolding. Always-in-the-making, shaped by people, story, and time.

And yet: what is a place becoming, in a world that has learned the power not only of atoms, or of clay, but also of information? And who are we becoming, when our consciousness is being shaped by systems whose logics we didn’t ask for and don’t fully understand?

I watch, listen, create, learn. I make no firm conclusions.

But I have spent twenty years working in the in-between space where the bounded worlds of place and the seemingly unbounded realities of information collide, co-evolve, and become something new. After this span of time, it seems I have a particular point of view, becoming clear to me now.

With every new gadget, data source, code base and now AI model we are confronted with variants on the same question: what can we do faster, cheaper, more, to get what we want, now?

But I keep getting bewildered by this desire for speed and for optimum control, because it’s not how I want to live in this world, and it’s not how I think about technology.

With every new platform, app, AI model, I instead find myself returning to variants on a different question:

We feel we are connected to everything. And yet, isn’t it strange, given all that connection, how often we are pulled away from where we actually are?

Our attention is elsewhere, captured by platforms designed to keep us scrolling, not noticing.

“An urban culture that predicates itself chiefly on an obsession with development is not worth having. A city needs deep memory, without which it becomes merely a stage set.” Robert Hughes said that in 1998. It feels ever more urgent now.

In 2005 I left full time work in media policy to study a PhD. I could see the shape of distributed, convergent media, and wanted to work with it as a different way to experientially encounter the city’s archive. Through sound recordings, I sought out places that “have no monument, no landmark to indicate their passing.” I called these resonant traces: reverberating with the echoes of past battles, evidencing the often contested, productive possibilities of a given location.

The practice of listening I cultivated then — of noticing what is hidden but wants to emerge — was designed to bring to life a more resonant and alive landscape that easily gets hidden in the built environment. Why couldn’t technologies of listening open up our minds and our imaginations to a different concept of place, one that holds within it many deep-time stories, within which we act.

This was my ‘place-making’ practice in motion. It has continued to evolve.

Across 15+ years of practice, I see a clear thread. Places are like archives, full of material and recorded and imaginative histories. In an age of immersive, experiential and now agentic media, how might we choose to encounter these many-storied collections? What practices might that entail.

Technology pulls us elsewhere, yes. But technology also brought us closer to each other in ways that would have been unimaginable a generation ago.

Technology in place can be used to enliven felt-connections to the lives of others, and in so doing, can help us maintain a situated, experiential knowledge of the environments that shape us. This perspective shapes all my work: from STORYBOX installations in community spaces, to participatory storytelling programs, to the civic AI governance work I do now.

The question is not whether we are pro-AI, or not. We are deeply enmeshed in planetary-scale technological architectures, which operate under conditions of ‘state craft’, whether or not we voted for them. Through our daily choices, about which platforms to use, which data to share, which automated systems to trust or resist, we are actively training the intelligences that shape material futures. These are micro political acts.

Increasingly, I wonder what kind of citizens we are becoming in relation to these planetary-scale systems. And I wonder: why can’t we create technologies that deepen our relationship to place? That open up our senses, our sightings. That help us to notice, connect, and experience more. Not to control or contain, but to enliven.

This is the practice I work to refine, with all my partners and collaborators.

It is from this grounding, rooted in both the power of places and the potential for a more relational, care-full approach to designing technologies, that I forge my work.

I call this practice: from enlightenment to enlivenment.

Enlightenment promised that knowledge would set us free. It gave us extraordinary tools for understanding the world. But it also gave us the habit of standing outside the things we study, treating places as objects, people as users, knowledge as something to extract rather than something to tend.

Enlivenment begins from a different place. It asks: what if the work is not to illuminate from above, but to animate from within? What if the goal is not to know more, but to notice more? Not to design solutions, but to create conditions from which acts of care, custodianship, and curiosity can emerge?

So I have arrived at a set of principles. These guide a practice that interweaves place-stories with digital architectures. I have watched many waves of urban technology ‘flood the zone’ with triumphalist accounts, which I feel often flatten the mysterious wonder of places-in-transition.