Ecologies of Thought: Generative Art as a Collaborative Research Methodology with Guarani and Kaiowá Indigenous Communities

SHORT PAPER. The Ecologies of Thought project aimed to reconceptualize the relationships between ecological and technical knowledge, seeking an epistemological understanding that pushed beyond nature vs. culture divides. More than a conceptual and theoretical proposal, which was based on the technodiverse notion of cosmotechnics, the project developed practical and experimental methodologies in collaboration with the Guarani and Kaiowá Indigenous communities of Brazil to further this investigation. With an international and interdisciplinary partnership, we researched relationships between sounds and plants in indigenous cosmology and the ways in which these relationships can help us to more deeply understand a notion of ecology that is based on the poetics of care. With that, we created a series of collaborative virtual reality experiments using generative art processes, which proved to be an interesting methodology of artistic creation as research.