1 Introduction

This paper shares the experience of using entanglement as a lens and structuring metaphor in a research project on inspiring societal transformation. The project, CreaTures, investigated how experience-based art and design can help people imagine and seek out different futures. We sought to create the project in such a way that it practiced the changed relations we wanted to inspire. Thus, our aim in adopting entanglement in CreaTures was to explore eco-social transformative creative practices in an embodied way and investigate how they could have global influence without resorting to the “growth is good” paradigm of Western techno-economic business models. In CSCW, we see a history of practice with an ecological basis, mindful of the complex agencies and relations in which all design and development sits. People are treated as part of a web of actions and reactions that are inevitably tied together. In the ecological orientation of (E)CSCW (Light et al. 2023), we see a kinship with the underlying philosophy of our CreaTures project and hope that by making such relations explicit in this paper, we can contribute to the future of CSCW as well as other creative projects for transformation.

1.1 Structuring metaphors

We start with the premise that there are structuring metaphors in use to explain relations in/with the world and these affect how relations are understood and developed (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). A dominant structuring metaphor of scale underpins growth ambitions in the globalized networked economy. By viewing relations in terms of scale, “large”, “growing” and “scalable” become desired characteristics (Larsen-Ledet et al. 2022). The authors instead embraced interdependent co-existence as an organizing principle for designing our project, with interlinked actors, artefacts, and actions, following the commitments of entanglement. This aligns with our belief that humanity needs to focus on interdependence if we are to move out of current destructive regimes to find new ones. To move on, we argue, means doing relations differently: not only holding an alternative ontology (our way of understanding the world) for the duration, in this case, of a three-year project, but enacting it.

Our embrace of entanglement is political: part of trying to leave a global functionalist ‘productivity’ culture where ‘Big Tech’ monopolies encourage extractivist resource use (Barendregt et al. 2021) and the individualization and monetization of human activity (henceforth ‘techno-economic’ values). We understand this productivity culture as promoting dissociation from life’s interdependencies: a fatal path for all species. In this paper, we detail the challenges and intimacies that have resulted from pursuing alternatives. We do so to reflect on our processes, but also on the work of making relations, to support CSCW interest in feminist new materialism and entangled approaches to intervention, both recent (e.g. Avlona and Shklovski 2023; Dolejšová et al 2023) and historic (Markussen 1996; Star 1990; Suchman 1993).

1.2 Aligning with work; challenging productivity

We note that in many, if not most, CSCW papers, contribution to technology design is the dominant feature. CSCW has been conceived as ‘an endeavor to understand the nature and requirements of cooperative work with the objective of designing computer-based technologies for cooperative work arrangements’ (Schmidt and Bannon 1992, p. 11). While considering technology, this paper seeks to step back from a design paradigm that starts with the function of tools, instead to look at the practices that might emerge from a different understanding of human-world relations. This stance harkens back to CSCW’s traditional interest in work and the performance of cooperative actions, where it is “difficult to delineate the 'individual' and the 'collaborative' (Heath and Luff 1992, p88) and actions are intrinsically embedded in “a socio-interactional organisation which provides for their systematic and situational accomplishment” (ibid, p87).

We call on Schmidt’s (2011) analysis of how work is understood in CSCW. Drawing attention to a rich history of workplace studies, Schmidt stresses the term is ‘used, in ordinary language, to express or emphasize that the given activity serves useful or necessary practical purposes, and that it therefore requires effort and concentration and presumes mastery of all sorts technicalities’ (p376). Work is ‘serious stuff: activities faced with serious complexities’; it demands the best, requiring: ‘skill and competence, stamina and effort, dedication and attention’ (ibid, p376). Work has many expressions, but it is known by its point (ibid).

In this spirit, we seek to analyse how work produces relations for particular ends, with thought to how we understand our socio-technical ambitions and our practices of research, rather than production of tools. We suggest that mainstream production involves workers labouring seriously and industriously against their own interests, in a crisis context where relations need to be radically remade. To remake socio-technical relations is to reset our cultures and offer hope for liveable futures. We resist the canonical pull towards implications for design (Dourish 2006), at least as far as tools, to focus on examining practice. We place the emphasis on understanding the nature of cooperative work at a time of crisis, rather than, as many have, finding things for computing to support.

The authors come from different worlds (spanning seven nations and three continents) with diverse experience of entanglement as “enacted theory”, reflecting the different traditions we are schooled in. However, we write from the Global North: our project was based in Europe, funded and governed by the European Union and framed by Modernist-colonialist-capitalist practices with a tendency to exalt the technological, functional and managerial. We see a fundamental tension between our intention, through our work, to change social mores to acknowledge and act on interdependencies and the systems of knowledge, economics and politics that legitimized the project through funding and evaluation. Thus, in embracing interdependence, we embrace a conception at odds with the dominant worldview around us – dominant in academia too, where the authors earn their living. Even the idea that worlds can be pinned down for study and change is a construction at odds with the commitments of entanglement.

So, while we see CSCW considering how people are entangled in the systems, institutions and infrastructures our societies have built, from global economic networks to digital automation and artificial intelligence, we also want to consider how people are entangled in the trajectories possible and desirable in pasts-presents-futures. And there are primordial entanglements to consider: lifeforms are entangled in our need for breath and energy, across animal, plant and fungal life (Coccia 2019); lifeforms are entangled as ecologies in the need for habitable homes. The authors are alive to alternative worlds-making positions, reflecting an interest in Indigenous and subaltern perspectives and cosmologies that respect these processes better, yet have been struggling to gain legitimacy in dominant Western traditions.

We start with this commentary to reiterate that everyone works enveloped in a progress-driven, rationalist, neoliberal world, whatever our commitments, and that it is not the only, or even a desirable, way to organize our societies and our lives.

1.3 CreaTures

We brought our interest in entanglement to design CreaTures (Creative Practices for Transformational Futures: https://creatures-eu.org), an action research project advocating greater recognition of interdependencies. CreaTures challenged crisis communication by sharing tactics for hopeful futures, working with creative practitioners offering experiences of how things could be different and analysing their ambitions and impacts. The outcome was the CreaTures Framework (https://creaturesframework.org), a resource developed for creative practitioners, policy-makers/funders, and researchers interested in stimulating eco-social change. The Framework offers analytic categories with which to design or evaluate transformative creative practice, such as embodying, codesigning and inspiring, pointing out that evaluation itself is a creative act, but one that belongs to a particular accountability ethos (see Vervoort et al. 2024). The Framework emerged from three years of intense research and collaboration between artists, policy-makers, scientists, funders and others, led by a consortium of universities, NGOs and artists. Despite multiple waves of COVID-19 pandemic, we gathered and analysed 140 creative projects that partners found transformative and sponsored 20 experimental artistic productions to consider their engagement styles and achievements.

Drawing on this context for our contribution, we ask how we might learn from our experience of socio-technical systems in attempting a new understanding of relations. We introduce the concepts informing this work and how we structured the research project, before presenting a CreaTures case study and concluding with reflections. We build our case slowly and thoroughly as part of our methodology.

2 Concepts

CreaTures embraced entanglement as a form of collaboration that recognizes ecological complexity in the socio-technical. Using entanglement as a structuring metaphor for design and analysis is only one possible attempt to break with damaging norms, but, we believe, important for making sense of always evolving ecological and social predicaments. Acknowledging entanglement speaks to an understanding of agency and pluralism that resists the grand linear narratives of empire (e.g. Spivak 2003) and recognises the more-than-human (Akama et al. 2020; Choi et al. 2023; Dolejšová et al. 2023; Light et al. 2024). This has implications for how we perceive and conduct empirical research, so this section reviews the concepts pertinent to our research and our agency as researchers in adopting them. We are aware that the theories and concepts mobilized here do not render a simple picture, but doing so would not be accurate. Wishing to acknowledge our influences and build our argument, we risk sounding convoluted, yet all the concepts described here were used and are required in an account of a complex process. They not only denote alliances, lineage, or work as analytical tools, they have been generative of and shaped our design practices within the project. Figure 1 highlights some of these key relations.

Figure 1.
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Linking the concepts in this paper.

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2.1 A paradox concerning agency

We start by acknowledging the paradox in trying to analyze and direct change in the enmeshed, ever-evolving systems that inform the idea of entanglement. Just as interdisciplinarity requires us to speak across sometimes incommensurable gaps, so we speak here as actors in uneasily-aligned worlds. The paradox haunts our work and what we can meaningfully say, here and elsewhere, about how effects are created, i.e. about our agency as designers and researchers.

However, we attempted to use our key concept entanglement—with its sibling interdependence – in two respects: first, to interpret and explain relationships within our project (as researchers) and, second, in shaping its form and ambitions (as designers). In other words, we regarded the concept as generative of structure. In doing so, we attempted to enact what Wahl (2016) calls design as ‘the expression of our theories about the world’ (p129) to create a new starting point for arriving at different outcomes and conclusions, in effect a different ethos. This seeks to exploit the impact of metaphors in design (Benyon and Imaz 1999), yet, ironically, the metaphor we chose troubles linear, cause-and-effect impacts. Nonetheless, Haraway asserts it matters what stories tell stories (2019), implying that our frameworks for thinking relate to where they lead. Similarly, Strathern (2018) suggests that understandings of "relation" shape what relations are possible and possibly understood. Drawing on these ideas, we experimented with project design.

2.2 Entanglement and the socio-technical

We informed our understanding of entanglement (and agency) with Barad’s descriptions: ‘Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating’ so that it is impossible to differentiate absolutely ‘between creation and renewal, beginning and returning, continuity and discontinuity’ (2007 p128). Barad presents research as the act of investigating phenomena that appear in the moment of investigation, formed as ‘a specific intra-action of an 'object' and the 'measuring agencies'’ (ibid).

Entanglement as a relational concept, including Barad’s interpretation, is not new to the fields of CSCW. Bratteteig and Verne (2012) use it in working on public sector technology design, noting that ‘disentangling refers to the process of analyzing and describing a sociomaterial entanglement in its constituents’ (p17). Similarly, Latva-Somppi et al. (2021) work with entanglements to explore how design might act with responsibility, hope and care. Frauenberger argues that our intimate entanglement with digital technologies is challenging the foundations of current HCI research and practice (2019), which Pradhan (2021) takes forward into a CSCW analysis of AI and older people’s care. Other approaches to applying the idea of entanglement include Kou and Gui (2018) looking at the phenomenon of Quantified Self and Tchernavskij and Bødker (2022) talking of entangled artefacts. Through this work, we can hear a different way of thinking arise, yet it does not crystalize into discussion of a different ontological starting point.

Beyond this, the CSCW field has many references to the enmeshment of the social/technical and other scholars who share our frustration with current divisive norms, such as Lampinen (2021) and Rossitto et al. (2022), while Berns et al. (2021) ask how to rethink socio-technical mechanisms to ‘move away from narratives of efficiency’ and avoid ‘processes of individualisation of interactions and othering’ in a spirit similar to the work here.

The value for us in embracing entanglement as something more than specific examples of enmeshed social and technical phenomena is a belief that only acknowledgment of relational ontologies and foregrounding this in our design work can create the conditions for more equitable and sustainable paths at a cultural level. In choosing this challenge, the team sees that ‘we need to be designerly enough to rethink and remake our world, but an element most in need of change is the nature of designing itself’ (Bardzell et al. 2021), away from functionalist pursuits of efficiency to fecund alternatives (ibid).

2.3 Entanglement, interdependence and practice

Entanglement is allied, but contrasts in focus, with the familiar metaphor of network from, for instance, of Actor-Network-Theory (e.g. Latour 1996). There can be more or less entangled readings of network relations and their agencies, and of how assemblages perform. The term entangled is not merely recognition of webs and ecologies; it emphasizes that interdependence precedes and enables life as ‘a pre-condition’ and basis for mutual care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2012, p198). Such a position means it is impossible to stand outside the system as commentator, controller, computer scientist or designer. This offers a challenge to the science, technology and politics that shape the operational space for our project. In worlds emerging through interdependence, there is no outside from which to measure impact; phenomena co-influence one another in ways that cannot be neatly assigned to particular moments or acts.

In such a world, we heed Galloway (2019), who suggests humility should be foundational to avoid the arrogance of assuming the need to solve ‘the problem’ even before questioning if there is a problem and for whom. In living with uncertainty, Choi and Galloway (2021) call for a change that ‘must start with the self […as] we are not singular but holobionts, a coalescence of animals and other living things’ (p24) while Akama et al. (2020) argue that acknowledging interdependence leads to recognizing participation with more diverse entities. Such a position enables us to acknowledge and honour Indigenous and other cultures that have lived with relational ontologies from time immemorial. It puts an onus on us to observe carefully and describe practice in detail, recognizing that the research we do is as much a practice as anything we single out for study.

In its practice-based approach (Kuutti and Bannon 2014) and interest in how groups achieve collaboration, the CSCW community is often implicitly considering practices as manifestation of a worldview. The commitments of ethnomethodology have been core to framing CSCW (Blackwell et al. 2017), with an interest in how members speak about their work. Kuutti and Bannon (2014) comment that, nonetheless, interest in agency has been muted and, perhaps, theories of agency even more so. It is timely, then, to extend consideration of how we theorise the assemblages we form, pointing to ecological concepts that stress co-constitutive dynamics.

Stengers ascribes a radical role to practices in mutual formation: ‘An ecology of practices does not have any ambition to describe practices ‘as they are’ … It aims at the construction of new ‘practical identities’ for practices … as they may become’ (Stengers 2005). For us, practice is always personal, collective, situated, and becoming, starting with the question-at-hand rather than knowledge domains. This interest in practice, relations and their transformation led us to set up CreaTures as an experiment in form. We are motivated to find allies and see CSCW colleagues reaching towards similar ends.

2.4 “Project” work

As researchers, we are required to design projects if we wish to assemble resources and enjoy the status of a public research question. Despite the limitations of the “project” as a unit of action (Agid 2016), projects meet the challenges of delivery; reviewing them extends understanding of what can be achieved through co-working in specific situations and conditions. Moreover, projects offer frames to surface the epistemologies and ontologies that collaborators bring. In the past, this has helped shape research agendas. For example, following the Health Information Systems Programme (HISP) has had repercussions on understanding of mutual learning and cross-cultural work (Braa and Sahay 2013), while the development of interest in infrastructuring owes much to Karasti and collaborators’ (Karasti and Baker 2004; Karasti et al. 2010) exploration of how the Long-Term Ecological Research network projects constructed its matters ‘of concern’ (Latour 2004; Marres 2012) in their uses of technology. Their reading of Star’s infrastructural relations (Neumann and Star 1996; Star 1999) situates relations-forming among connected agents through which structures emerge, re-forming processes coalesce, and values and power relations are encountered (Karasti 2014). Similarly, we hope that, in describing choices made in designing the CreaTures project, we set the scene for broader discussions.

3 The project

Creative Practice for Transformative Futures (CreaTures) was a three-year EU funded project to investigate and report on the role that participatory creative practices can play in helping imagine and articulate transformative, caring and sustainable futures – what we might understand as a strong sustainability position oriented towards system change and away from lightly-adapted “business-as-usual”. The project followed a pilot study into creative practices’ role in transforming futures, aimed at policymakers (Light et al. 2018, 2019). A central tenet was that creative practices are already actively involved in linking designers, artists, cultural workers and citizen-led collectives in complex issues of climate change and social inequalities. These practices involve a wide range of aesthetic, affect-driven, reflective, immersive and participatory approaches, but are often poorly resourced, badly understood and fragmented (Light et al. 2018, 2019).

The original study suggested that introducing socially-oriented creative practice can enhance existing group activities, linking local context with global issues and building significance by connecting this broader context to ordinary life. For instance, a creative practitioner is introduced to a charity encouraging bicycle use and brings considerations of city layout and how to encourage others to leave their cars (Hetherington and Heaney 2019). Transforming towards more sustainable cultures, in this example, means impacting people’s sense of meaning by helping them encounter their place in the world and how that position relates to connection and belonging (e.g. Davis et al. 2018). This, in itself, is an entangled way of coming at the world: helping link local actions to the wider movements of the planet, its lifeforms and its politics, so that interdependencies become more tangible. A similar ethos is found in decades of CSCW research on how attention to local detail, sustained engagement and reiteration can inspire change (e.g. Bødker et al. 2017).

3.1 Project design

Taking insights from the pilot study about inducing intimacy through collaboration, we designed CreaTures as an exploration of creative practices for transformative ends. Our team was an international, transdisciplinary, practice-based consortium with 11 partners from arts, design, policy and research organizations, where researchers and creative practitioners acted together as co-investigators. We formed it in the image of the pilot research findings: intimate, entangled, and involved in people’s lives. While, as stated, our focus was not specifically on technology use, in our action research, we encountered many socio-technical assemblages, some specifically involving digital activities, such as online games. Digitally-mediated communication formed most of our interactions during the COVID-19 pandemic. We consider these relations as integral to our project and its changing dynamics, as part of wider concerns about the techno-economic ethos in which we live and work.

EU projects are usually conducted by dividing work into discrete packages that perform without many dependencies, assigning expertise in this techno-economic mode and protecting ownership of outcomes. There is usually a ‘work package’ (WP) on maximizing impacts. Resisting customary project management waterfall structures (Carayannis et al. 2005), we planned the action research to consist of tightly-woven components: Laboratory, Observatory, Engagement, Evaluation. These components ran not so much in parallel as enmeshed, informing one another throughout the project’s life.

The Laboratory formed the kernel of the project, where our creative practitioner partners produced Experimental Productions (ExPs), characteristic of their other transformation work but commissioned for CreaTures. The Observatory surveyed emerging eco-social transformative practices and observed ExPs. Evaluation articulated a frame through which the transformative potential of creative practices could be reviewed. Engagement worked with internal and external stakeholders to explore their learning towards potential change. That was the formal structure proposed, but at any time, most people were working across these structures as well as within them. Regular, frequent meetings in different groupings ensured knowledge was generated collaboratively.

This alternative orientation, greeted internally with some enthusiasm, produced a clash between our ambitions and the expectations of the project evaluators who controlled funding and sign-off on all deliverables. We met them first in a brutal seven-hour video-conference (with fewer screen breaks as tensions rose), caught in co-author Choi’s notes from our reflections:

Nerves were high. After a year of working closely together, we were preparing for the first formal review of our work. The only other commentary on our work had come from the panel that awarded us the funding, with unusually high scores and encouragement for what we set out to do together. What we proposed challenged the existing epistemological and methodological norms in similar EU programs and disciplinary domains. Our shared commitment to norm shifting helped us continue our intense collaboration, often well beyond our official commitments counted in “Person Months,” and across vast time differences through the pandemic. These additional human efforts are critical to a project but often invisible in evaluation.

The first review was a jarring experience.

What we were hearing as the review progressed was that the reviewers wanted a very different project to ours: one that would efficiently serve “hard” sciences and policymakers by instrumentalizing creative practices as public communication and engagement tools: to find ways to translate answers already found in ‘hard’ sciences to reach ‘target’ audience groups. It categorically undermined our study’s premise to acknowledge and work with different, and commonly marginalized ways of knowing (and being) enabled by creative practices, although this difference was precisely what drove us to undertake the work and why the project was originally funded. Further, because part of the funding is withheld by the funder until the reviewer’s requests are fulfilled, there is diminutive room for negotiation. This kind of demand, made in a strict power relation, shifts the project’s trajectory from its flourishing to survival. Entanglements are action in themselves and create spaces for action; they stay alive through flourishing. Thus, keeping it in predefined constraints will not assure its survival but the opposite.

More viscerally, seeing the impact the review process had on researchers caused agony. As supervisors and colleagues, we were entrusted to ensure their work is valued and has influence in ways that we collectively believe in and that they can confidently continue their own research journeys. To see the disbelief and ache felt like personal failure. Many later expressed that the review experience fractured the cultural dynamics that used to invite active exploring of entanglements through participation. (Choi, reflections on the CreaTures project, 2021)

The discouraging review enabled us to see how our research might be received and recognise the work needed to communicate the vision. This tension was never resolved, though, for practical purposes, a change in review team later in the project brought a more sympathetic understanding of our questions and methods.

3.2 Project messages and transformative processes

Messaging about environmental sustainability has been largely negative and disaster-oriented, aimed at simple behavioural targets and mostly concerned with reducing global and individual carbon footprints (Rayner and Minns 2015). CreaTures-sponsored work was hopeful, concerned itself with cultural shifts towards fundamentally different relations, welcomed diverse visions of futures, valued plurality as a transformative factor in itself, and saw destabilization of norms as a necessary part of introducing something richer and better able to serve planetary life.

The research team did not produce an a-priori definition of transformation, but explored the examples being prepared (20 productions) and collected (in all, 140 transformative activities) to understand what each creative practitioner was trying to achieve and how. This range in itself became a research finding (see Ampatzidou et al. 2022; Dolejšová et al. 2021; Houston et al. 2022; Light et al. 2024). The ExPs we sponsored/observed varied in theme, ambition, means of engagement, size of budget and degree of spectacle and these dimensions did not correlate directly with influence or even the plane on which influence was understood to be manifesting. Some addressed (inter)species relations, hoping to impact how people understand themselves as part of the world, relate to other species, embrace the need for greater social and environmental justice and protect biodiversity. Some proposed different care relations and enacted them through new social structures or encounters with others. Some targeted global systems of oppression and others focused on local action. All made moments of reflection possible, articulating the changes they intended to make as part of making them, and most brought individuals or small groups to consider existential issues through affective interventions designed to help people see themselves and their worlds differently. Using primarily arts methodologies, they made space for people to have these encounters, rather than designing outcomes; employing diverse method, tools, politics, locations/venues and aesthetic appreciation of the potential for altered relations. Associated engagement activities were also diverse, ranging from panel discussions with scientists, policy makers, and citizens to using digital sensors to observe the health of forests.

This action research exemplified the tensions of the project’s ambitions: on the one hand, to capture, analyze and share creative partners’ practices, strategies and ambitions in a framework, and, on the other, to respect the complexities that come with working across systems and societal-ecological relations.

3.3 Entangled relations

We selected partners wanting to engage with experimental processes that explore new ways of relating, focusing on qualitative transformation, not numbers. Thus, demonstrable change could occur across different and unpredicted dimensions. Further, our starting relations were so far from domain-specific or ‘controlled’ that we knew we were not producing traditional scientific outputs. Instead, we acknowledged process to be central, and the shaping of process as a politics.

Here, notes from co-author Botero give a sense of the entangled relations of our partners’ work and the compromises negotiated:

All of these productions at the start look quite self-contained, but soon there are new collaborators, or new venues, new threads to follow, new themes that cannot be avoided. Voila! What looks like a small happening, in practice ends up being a big complex web that grows infinitely. Then, there are the larger installations: they occupy space, mentally and physically but, at least, it is space that can be pointed at. By now it is obvious that size is a futile metric. ExPs also come with their own histories of previous incarnations. That makes it difficult to draw boundaries or explain when an ExP begins or ends. All their tentacles are needed, all are important, all providing interesting insights on what it takes to mobilize (or not) collective imagining and questioning. Having stared many times at the spreadsheet that traces the development of all ExPs, I can see the connections between them, and between them and sustainability clearly in my mind, but I have difficulty articulating them to others in the form of a red thread. All is a soup in my mind, a noodle soup that needs to be eaten completely. Reporting wants us to put the broth in one side, the onions there, and the tofu apart. We also made too much soup, there are 21 ExPs by now.

We have workarounds to keep sane as we end up having co-conspirators we have to call subcontractors, co-creators that need to be referred to as participants, participants that are described as audiences, and audiences that sometimes we have to refer to as “data subjects.” We wrap those workarounds tightly around descriptions as one wraps corn dough, vegetables and meat inside plantain leaves when making tamales. The plantain leaves are tightly wrapped so dissimilar tastes are cooked together, so that nobody suspects there are workarounds.

We present both Tamales and Noodle Soup as things that should be eaten together… some people have a hard time understanding why both are needed. (Botero, reflections on the CreaTures project, 2021)

3.4 Our ambitions and the Covid-19 pandemic

Into this mix came the COVID-19 pandemic, within weeks of the project’s start. As has been documented elsewhere, this changed the opportunities for working, for research and creative practice (e.g. Dey et al. 2020; Tang et al. 2022; Vargo et al. 2021). It changed our engagement styles, the tools we used and how we felt about them. The pandemic provided ‘a resource, albeit an unwelcome one, to observe and analyse these tensions in practice’ (Tang et al. 2022).

The nations of CreaTures’ partners imposed variants of lockdown, with Finland the most lenient and Spain, the Netherlands and the UK adopting policies that closed arts institutions and outlawed face-to-face meetings. This turned expectations of watching well-established practitioner partners perform confident transformation into a series of unexpected moves in unfamiliar realms. Relations in the team changed. Artists wanted to know from researchers what would be acceptable for research purposes and how they could continue in a different mode. We worked collaboratively as intended, but not in the formations we anticipated; far from moving among confident productions as observers and analysts, researchers became more integral to the artistic choices made and practitioner partners became yet more experimental in their practices.

Not only were creative partners obliged to rethink their contributions, researchers lost capacity to observe partners’ activities and meet participants. We had expected to use ethnographic methods at in-person events. Now we were watching groups appear on digital video platforms. Whereas we had originally been interested in how place intersected with partner’s ambitions and shaped practices, observational practice was confined: online or not at all. We could no longer sense reactions or follow intuitions; all questions had to be conducted as formal follow-up across computer networks.

In essence, our project became disembodied. Partners attended just one management meeting in person before decrees were put in place. No work had yet been initiated. Some staff had not commenced their contracts when the in-person meeting took place and never met the team or their local colleagues except on screen. An emotional in-person (re)union took place after 26 months.

For a project that was interested in the flux of relations, such changes were a challenge but also a learning opportunity. It begged us to ask how far the form of delivery was central to what was delivered and how far changes in relations were a result of encountering particular artifacts constituted in particular ways. The transformations taking place were more arbitrary than those we had hoped to encounter, but they were useful for destabilizing assumptions. In the next sections, we discuss what this meant.

4 Working relationally

Even before the set-back of pandemic restrictions, we had considered general devices to resist linearity, problematize project management structures and point to the entangled relations we understood to underlie our work. For instance, in writing the bid, we wove accountabilities between work packages, as above. And as other tactics, we:

  • Recruited research staff interested in systems and relationality.

  • Addressed “futures”, in the plural, and allowed every partner to bring (keep, and articulate) different ambitions for those futures, with different understandings of what it means to intervene.

  • Allocated time to build common understandings across the different disciplines involved (design, art, ecology, etc.), through meetings, seminars, conversations and constant revisiting of themes.

  • Established a grouping of research fellows answering as much to the project as to individual packages.

  • Questioned the idea of direct impact as a goal or a possibility, to explore influences of many kinds.

  • Introduced elements of theory into practical planning and execution (e.g. how entanglement in practice might entail different ways of thinking and designing, guided by ideas of care).

  • Interrupted sessions repeatedly to turn ideas round in multiple ways, with a focus on connecting rather than isolating them (including graphically mapping the interrelations in themes that partners brought as transformative influences).

  • Developed objects of study that included relations, emergences, genealogies and interrelations of influence.

Eventually, we wove outputs into a Framework (https://creaturesframework.org/) where threads for different user types snake through our materials, attempting to stay true to the entangled vision.

4.1 Tactics for entangling in person

Our earliest practical steps to reflect on entanglement were designed as in-person activities to be run at the first project partners management meeting (about 25 people). Running through the formal planning and exercises (such as asking partners to describe their mission) were exercises to reinforce relational thinking. We mapped our existing relations, making an embodied sociometric graph in the room (Figure 2a) and recording connections on a sheet on the wall (Figure 2b). We generated new links by asking people to find what represented a connection between them. This worked to reveal existing patterns and support newcomers to the team.

Figure 2.
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a/b: Identifying social networks at the first meeting.

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4.2 Tactics for entangling in lockdown

During measures to reduce the spread of COVID-19, subsequent meetings were conducted online for the next two years, with a few exceptions for local staff in Finland. This was, at first, understood to be a major barrier to our ambitions to enact entangled relations. Would everything stay compartmentalized from hereon? But there was a proliferation of online workshops – as many as 4 per week – and themes that ran through the year as a source of working parties. Relations were perhaps more intense because, instead of saving ideas for face-to-face meetings, ideas were shared and developed at weekly meetings to which everyone or anyone could be invited (with no extra budget or travel time). In fact, we concluded, we had been forced to work in a more interwoven way by losing points in the year when we came together. It was notable that, in the final year when face-to-face meetings resumed, research progress was made on trips to see each other, but different project teams spent less time connecting with each other between visits and worked less cohesively. Thus, despite frustration, we reflect that the research group had a very collaborative culture while principally online. (This acknowledgement should not obscure that it was not always easy to work collaboratively and that, many times, many of us felt lost.)

To give a flavour of relations under maximum restrictions, we quote from Light’s reflections on working outside traditional linear structures:

We have regular zoom meetings between Observation (WP2) and Evaluation (WP4) because it is clear that they couldn’t stay in boxes… How do you evaluate without observation and how do you decide what to observe without some sense of what is of value? What can be asked? What is useful for practitioners to know about evaluation? And who should be evaluating? If our partners’ ambitions for ontological change are successful, we might not do evaluation as we know it… that is the kind of change being mooted, away from functionalism towards more graceful co-existence. But to think those thoughts and explore their repercussions, we cannot stay in silos. We have to notice, debate, consider and weigh. We have to reckon on more meetings than we would like to fit into the week. And all those conversations that would be happening if we were walking to and from meetings with our colleagues are happening in our heads, alone. There are no corridor chats in this project, just text-based chats to act as back-channels.

Everyone has a notional stake in everything we do together. Not everyone goes to every meeting or reads every document, but all are invited and could bring value to it. There is no hierarchy that determines how, just another invitation in the inbox. Suddenly another workshop needs our presence. I love how the project reflects the people and ideas. I love how initiatives flare up. But, in common with everyone, I feel this emphasizes the insufficient time available. It is the price for a project where there are no imposed lines of division between topics; there are no arbitrary decisions on who should be involved or how to address the system as a whole. That said, we are talking about the transformation of cultures and we have three years. By the time this project is over, we will only just have learnt what it offers and what we might do with it. (Light, reflections on the CreaTures project, 2021)

While we missed the incidental management of relations, we mainly missed the in-person experience of our partners’ work. This pushed the focus onto their intentions and how their mission and/or plans had changed. As we narrate below, this change became integral in some partners’ work.

5 Entangling with technology: the hologram

We focus next on the dynamics of socio-technical entanglement in work by one of the CreaTures practitioners. We have chosen the The Hologram ExP because it benefited from the move to online activities in early 2020. When the lockdown in the UK stopped in-person meetings, The Hologram looked more viable than many other plans. The art project was carefully prepared by its creator Cassie Thornton over several years (Thornton 2020). Nonetheless, a different version went forward, adapted for the times, and as a project concerned with process, open to further emergent aspects to shape it.

5.1 The hologram

Originally conceived to involve face-to-face participation, The Hologram was born in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008. The crisis hit particularly hard in Greece. Unable to repay its sovereign debt, the Greek government made wide-ranging cuts to public health. A movement of solidarity health clinics staffed by volunteers emerged to fill the gap, providing mutual aid to residents who could no longer pay hospital charges. This became a crucible for experimentation around different models of healthcare, made more pressing in the wake of the refugee crisis of 2015.

In 2017, artist and debt activist Thornton visited the Thessaloniki Group for a Different Medicine (GDM) to learn more about their Integrative Model, in which patients (Incomers) are inducted into the clinic by three practitioners: a general physician, psychotherapist, and social worker (or volunteer). During a 90-min session, the trio survey the Incomer’s physical, emotional and social health, including living conditions, work and social networks. The GDM clinic explained that by attending to these three aspects of health together they ‘are trying to make a hologram of every person: a three-dimensional image of health’ (Thornton 2020, p7-8). GDM staff invite the Incomer to become an active participant in the management of their own health – understanding this as central to their treatment—while embedding them into collective support structures (and thereby undermining the neoliberal tendency to offload care onto individuals under the guise of self-sufficiency). In much Western care, patients are ‘typically seen either as a body, a worker, or a person, but never as all three at once’ (Thornton 2020, p5). The Integrative Model sets about undoing that alienation.

Following this visit, Thornton played with this structure in her art practice – naming it after the visual metaphor of the hologram. She designed a protocol for mutual aid, where a person known as ‘the hologram’ invites three friends or acquaintances (‘the triangle’) to meet on a regular basis and follow the Hologram protocol, which includes a format for meetings. Echoing the GDM induction, each triangle member attends to either physical, emotional or social health. The hologram sets out something she would like to discuss. Akin to a therapeutic space, the triangle members ask questions, designed to elicit further information, connections and insights (avoiding advice) and provide whole-body extended experiences of trust and care.

In February 2020, Thornton embarked on a residency with CreaTures partner Furtherfield. The team planned to run a series of courses to develop and stabilize the nascent hologram protocol, and to see how the wider practice (named ‘social holography’) might develop. However, just weeks later, Furtherfield had to suspend in-person activity as the pandemic spread. Thornton moved her explanatory course to a video-conferencing platform, joining a collaborative experiment where all in-person, participatory, social practice art became abruptly mediated.

5.2 The hologram course

The Hologram courses provide a way for people to learn to be a hologram, set up their triangle and hold meetings using Thornton’s simple protocol. They offer opportunity to encounter the underpinning ideas, including deep, collective reflections on how people relate to one another under current conditions of financialized capitalism and ongoing crises. Courses also allow the creators to develop the practice and to build community around it. During the course the group read and consider insights from Thornton's book The Hologram (2020), practicing in small groups. Thoughts and feelings are shared, with course sessions creating situations of supported vulnerability. They are free for participants.

Hologram courses were attended by CreaTures researchers and one of the co-authors (Houston) began interviews with Thornton and collaborators Ruth Catlow and Lita Wallis. This account is based on those interviews, Houston’s auto-ethnography (second online course, late 2020), Light’s auto-ethnography (third online course, early 2021) and further conversations with Thornton. (Quoted material comes from the course rather than individual holograms, which are confidential and managed locally between the hologram and the three ‘triangle’ members.)

Courses ran for 3 hour a week for six weeks at outset and brought together a group of about 30 people to experience and learn the protocol. The first session of each course involves a demo. To quote from Houston’s auto-ethnographic vignette:

A course facilitator becomes the hologram, and three volunteers take the role of her triangle, moving through the five phases of a hologram meeting. First, each group member makes a shape with their body, and the others comment on it, as a way to open the conversation. This is called the ‘stuck dance’. Second, the hologram ‘marks the task’ that she’d like to address today with her triangle – she’s at a transition point in her life and wants to be surrounded by positive feelings. Third, the triangle members gently ask her clarifying questions, using the "we" pronoun instead of "I" (i.e. “we were wondering...”) which seems to create a powerful collectivising effect. Fourth, a set of reflections: the triangle members provide feedback to the hologram in the form of patterns, wishes or provocations. Finally, before ending, the triangle members take time to reflect on their own experience...

In answering their questions, the hologram allows herself to become vulnerable, even in front of this unknown audience sitting in the mediated darkness. During the reflection time, the triangle member tells the hologram how privileged he felt to take part in the meeting. In that moment the hologram’s vulnerability is transmuted into radical acceptance (Houston, notes on attending a Hologram course, 2020)

The vignette evokes the styles of interaction unfolding within the group. As a social technology, like many socially-engaged practices, The Hologram is more than a series of abstracted steps; it supports a particular quality of interaction. Healing, here, means practicing skills: patience, courage, listening, questioning and emotional stamina – the experience ‘of not needing to have the answer and feeling confident enough to try something, knowing it might not work’ (interview, 2021). It addresses ‘your capacity to imagine yourself as part of a whole and imagine how that whole impacts you’ (interview, 2021), i.e. acknowledging entanglement as both core to health and to how a triangle of people can support a fourth member. Tronto’s definition of care ‘as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible’ (1993) is made relevant here.

5.3 Doing care online

With a process not unlike that of a conventional therapeutic space, the practice adjusted well to going online. The focus on the central hologram and on question-asking differs from normal conversation. Deliberate pauses are left after each utterance, creating an atmosphere of deeper listening, prompting more considered responses and a balance between speakers. There is no advice-giving, just encouragement through questioning that is held in a formal structure.

Thus, patterns of speech in The Hologram course (and individual hologram practices, styled with the same ritual exchanges) suit the video-conferencing technology being used, where eye contact cannot be established between boxes, the order of participants differs on every screen and overlapping sounds are removed by the software, making interruptions all but impossible.

To manage the remoteness of online interaction, Thornton and Wallis focused on the challenges of leaving a session of video-conferencing in their course design: rather than 'hanging up' abruptly, they considered transitions with care and offered moments of collective grounding that allowed people to leave the session gracefully. In the vignette below, the group were asked to touch the edge of the computer monitor on ‘re-entering’ their physical space:

There was a delightful exit exercise: the best transition from Zoom to home that I’ve experienced in a year of solid Zoom. As I felt the hard shiny edge of the monitor, I realized I had never held it like that, just feeling its smooth imperviousness. Looked at from the side, the screen of the computer I’d been using is a miracle of thin, precise definition – almost the antithesis of the evening I’d just experienced, which was warm, rich, complicated, human, all about allowing some permeability.

To be back holding something in real life was a good transition, as was stepping out of my chair before leaving the group. This was a fine example of thinking ahead and caring for participants. I’ve experienced a number of harsh transitions out of zoom over the year, but got used to them. They are harshest when a sense of connection with relative strangers has grown... This transition had the potential to be abrupt in that way and the thought about how to add to the community of the moment was both kind and indicative of the values informing the project’s ambitions. (Light, notes on attending a Hologram course, 2021)

Another course exercise involved everyone putting their thumb to their computer’s camera (Figure 3). This created an unexpected feeling of togetherness for the group.

Figure 3.
figure 3

Putting thumbs up to the screen creates a collective togetherness.

Full size image

Beyond this styling, the move to online had specific benefits; for instance, many of the online attendees were people that could not have attended an in-person meeting in North London, where Thornton was based at first, or in Berlin, where she is at time of writing. Using videoconferencing means sessions can run anywhere with participants who can agree a time-zone and have computer access. Rather than having to choose neighbours or require friends to take a journey, the hologram can choose people who make the right life-long triangle members, respecting a feeling about with whom to share these moments. Remote connection offers the potential to keep continuity, given that people often move away for work or love.

The language of the first online meetings was English, with participation from English speakers in Europe and North America, but the mix was diverse in other respects. There are now courses run in Spanish and English and the first Spanish-only course has taken place for Spanish speakers across the world. Facilitators being trained in running the courses are able to teach anywhere that their timezone allows. This acts to spread the The Hologram model between areas. It is argued that online dating is changing the way that people’s networks operate, with greater intersection between cultures (Hergovich and Ortega 2018). Similarly, diverse course attendees are brought together and diverse triangle members connect in caring for a mutual hologram.

Through our observations, we gained evidence that videoconferencing made it easy to share intimacies during the course (and, by implication, also in hologram sessions). At a different time, meetings of the hologram and triangle could have developed as a neighborhood activity, closer to the face-to face encounters of the original Thessaloniki health clinics. There is now an emerging in-person practice, but there were new challenges to creating group cohesion and a ‘safe’ environment when the first course ran in physical space. This conforms to what is known about therapeutic activities online, where some styles of computer mediation can benefit self-disclosure, though nuanced by context (e.g. Yang et al. 2019).

Since the lockdowns, The Hologram has grown into a loose collective, with a virtual space on the Discord platform where organizing is conducted in a series of informal, opt-in working groups. In addition to courses (changing duration as experience grows – now 9 weeks × 3 hour), people can see talks and participate in workshops from The Hologram collective and a monthly online session offers anyone involved the chance to connect and find support. In Berlin, a face-to-face clinic is developing a hologram facility and there are support groups who meet weekly to develop the course iterations and related workshops. In Newcastle, UK, where one of the first in-person courses ran, there is now a regular meet-up. About 2000 people are regularly involved in some way.

Embedding the individual is managed in the social, mental and physical ‘holographic’ nature of the triangle’s practice, in the collective language of “we” and in the support set-up that builds community across holograms. Thus, many collective mechanisms exist round triangles and reinforce the challenging of individualism, despite the core concern for each person’s individual needs.

5.4 Analizing structure

The Hologram un-makes: repairing internal feelings of brokenness by understanding the reality of system dynamics. And it makes in significant other ways. The hologram knows that, at a time of crisis, they can call their triangle into being for support. Merely knowing the triangle is there can be a healing factor. And the chance to have one’s concerns acknowledged and accepted, as well as to reflect in a tranquil and accepting space, can be profound.

Thornton created the practice of ‘social holography’ with transformative aims. She explains: ‘The Hologram is intended as an open-source, peer-to-peer, viral social technology for de-habituating humans from capitalism’ (Thornton 2020, p20). Since capitalism is a phenomenon that ‘deeply influences how we relate to one another, how we interact, how we imagine ourselves and one another, even how we talk and feel’, The Hologram exists to change ‘cultures of financialization’ (Haiven 2014) by giving people experiences of radical acceptance and structures to recreate this regularly, over time, with trusted others. There are commitments in caring and learning care skills that come from joining the network (with skills training in questioning; holding roles; active listening; making wishes for your hologram, finding resonances and offering provocations). Triangles stay at one degree of separation from other triangles, making them powerful in organizing other care or solidarity activities across dispersed geographical locations. This has potential for changing dynamics beyond health support. Neoliberal subjectivity – that image of an endlessly desiring individual struggling in a world of limited resources – is carefully untethered to make room for something abundant in care.

Being a part of a hologram structure requires little material investment, apart from 90–120 min of videoconferencing bandwidth and the use of computing equipment for a meeting at a frequency of 6 weeks, more or less. It is a relatively low resource activity, though we are mindful that using computer cycles is never negligible (in fact, in aggregate, it has significant cost, Kingsley-Hughes 2021).

However, one needs the time and ability to make connections to produce this kind of resource, whereas the support systems in Greece did not rely on existing social connections. The Hologram management is considering how to include people without resources of time, circles from which to draw a triangle and/or with little practice at supportive questioning. And although these networks do not depend directly on computer use, competencies in videoconferencing are another spectrum of skills to consider in building an inclusive process.

To be a social remedy beyond people who are already well-resourced socially, The Hologram needs compassionate organizational structures for developing connections and skilling strangers to work sensitively together. Thornton and team are piloting these other types of triangle relations. The groups forming around the practice are experimenting with ways in which The Hologram can widen its benefit, working relationally in exchange with others who are different. It has been inviting groups such as healthcare practitioners to mutate the practice and experimenting with courses for those who identify as men (or masculine) to experience and shape the project, because these voices were lacking. This model of engagement centres on care and mindfully creates interdependencies, embedding entanglement in its design and strategies for sustaining itself.

This art, then, is not just a platitudinous expression of solidarity, but a protocol and structure designed to resist the marginalized shapes that care is forced into. As the centre of a triangle, it is ‘important to take responsibility for the health of your triangle members by helping them to learn how to be a hologram themselves’ (Catlow, interview 2020). This central convention allows for reciprocation between the triangle members (who are providing care) and the hologram (who is receiving it) without the transactional expectation that equal care needs to be given lest the relationship become ‘one-sided’. Instead, relations of care radiate outwards as holograms invite their triangle members to become holograms, who then support their triangle members to become holograms, all part of a wider community.

The assumption at the heart of The Hologram is that intimate transformations will aggregate in ways that change wider capitalist relations, moving towards structures that are more sustainable for humans and earth systems – an example of entangled agency as the structural metaphor, knowingly adopted as a challenge to current systems. The practice may grow virally across its networks, but not by ‘scaling up’ or providing a recipe or toolkit. It does so in ways that keep relevance, context and connection, tangled in local issues and care networks and independent of narratives of expansion for financial gain. Thornton has given thought to how the project can expand without venture-funded commercial models, embedding a viral structure inside the practice itself. In designing this peer-to-peer form, she was inspired by the Black Panther Party’s sharing of acupuncture techniques within their activist movement (Meng 2021). This dissemination mechanism, of triangles connecting (and connecting to further triangles), is designed to disrupt power relations where interpersonal care labour is externalized or relegated to the bottom of the labour market, to be picked up by women and other minoritized groups (Wrenn and Waller 2018). It resists techno-economic norms and, when it spreads, it does so by extending care person-by-person – it cannot ‘scale’ in the doing of the work.

Part of every course and whenever any new holograms are formed, there is an explanation of these post-capitalist politics, offering intellectual engagement with the relations it seeks to change. These aspects point to “living the proposition”, as Furtherfield co-founder Marc Garrett describes in an interview with Thornton (https://marcgarrett.org/2022/09/24/living-the-proposition-art-worlding-and-the-hologram), where creating new prototypes for living entails practices that cannot be disaggregated from each other, despite the different horizons against which they perform. We see an entangled practice emerge from the politics and structures of The Hologram, where care, managing distance, intimacy and their co-influence are integral parts.

The example of The Hologram is a good one with which to demonstrate entanglement across dimensions: it was not designed to fuse the sociopolitical and technical, but this became a further entanglement accompanying a political vision expressed in/as a structure of caring, as the pandemic restrictions transformed practice. As a lens, entanglement reveals nuances that might otherwise be lost.

6 Entanglements in practice?

So far, we have described what entanglement means for our project, showing first how it was incorporated in the design of our research and then how it was used to understand the work of an ExP supported by the project during a tumultuous pandemic and leading to rapid co-evolution of both. The Hologram, like CreaTures itself, can be regarded through conventional metaphors of scaling, but that does not reveal its priorities or innovations. Both CreaTures and The Hologram rejected conforming to the logics of capitalism, using digital networks to propagate a different ethos. Neither can be understood fully as care initiatives without an appeal to a different structural starting point.

Not every ExP addressed the same domain (i.e. The Hologram addressed care and health, but others tackled care and water, food, economics or biodiversity,) and not all have attempted to build a novel social structure and embed it in the world. Yet all CreaTures-sponsored projects dealt with relating: attending to both global systems and individual/group existential awareness, challenging the metaphors we live by, inviting consideration of more-than-human issues, inspiring care as political action, and trying to model new sensibilities (Light 2024). This entanglement of systems is central—calling out the limits of dealing with societal crises as a series of separable disciplines that prioritize the scientific and technological; offering instead a vision for system change.

Within CreaTures, we knew our findings to be artifacts of the instruments we used to measure (Barad 2007), but that is also the point. A different lens reveals different pathways. Of course, most projects have interrelated aspects, either in the planning or, by default, in the delivery and we have noted that the social and technical are interwoven, as the term ‘socio-technical’ implies and practice-based work accepts. Yet, adopting the structuring metaphor of entanglement in our designing and analysis of our actions affects the kind of issues we encounter and the understanding of collaboration we are developing. In the last sections, we consider what we have learnt and can derive from this experience and consider different entry points for the reader seeking to experiment alongside us.

6.1 Reflexivities

Reflexivity is an intrinsic part of trying to produce a different kind of research. To resist convention means paying attention to every part of one’s practice and being able to elaborate on how it is different and what its significance might be. We performed these reflections individually and collectively, as researchers and as creative practitioners, and used them to account for our action research, to articulate our project and to embed changing sensibilities more firmly in each other’s consciousness. Reflexivity was evident in The Hologram, which used, as part of its offering, reflective practices to bring people in and out of collaboration online, raised the politics of healthcare and capitalism and opened spaces for new ritualized support to improve skills. Thornton’s book The Hologram (2020) details how she devised and used techniques for reflective practice to articulate the value of reflection, thereby contributing to political, emotional and existential self-awareness.

More broadly, awareness was fostered by the upheaval introduced following the decrees emanating from COVID-19. Our ambitions to accompany experienced artists with their tested methods of engagement were thwarted. Conditions changed abruptly, leading to uncertainty, unanticipated forms of collaboration and an opportunity to think more differently than we had planned. We sought to make transformation, but were constantly asked to realign, both in ambitions and processes. There could be no baseline to evaluate from, even if we had considered that a useful starting point. Instead, partners and participants were asked to be reflexive as a process: made aware of their existing priorities and skills and given the possibility to reflect together on changes to these they would value and how they might, in fact, already be changed. This was evaluation that started from a different ethics – not of utilitarianism, but of care, and this ethos was fed into the final output, critiquing and rearticulating evaluation practice.

CreaTures research hinged on this reflexivity, collaborating across fields and professional orientations. It became triple-layered reflexive work:

  • The first layer concerns individual self-reflexivity. It requires dedicatedly questioning one’s values, thinking, feeling and action, and thus may be demanding; it needs an open collegial culture where, not only joys but also mistakes and fears can be shared with others. This leads to:

  • The second is the trusted group, with shared core values but different orientations to domains of enquiry, allowing opportunities to un-learn and re-learn with one-another towards collective transformation. In our case, it was the consortium, comprising different professional experiences and disciplinary backgrounds, but sharing a belief in entanglement as structural metaphor and the power of creative practice to change worlds.

  • The third is the diverse ecologies of which we are part. Conflicting worldviews need acknowledging for the second layer to be recognized, creating spaces for new and broader transformations. Within our project, this ranged from ExPs’ engagement activities involving members of the public to formal evaluation by reviewers.

Mindful of these layers, we drew others into the project’s orbit, following threads that became important to the project as we learnt our mission. Instead of observing pre-project to post-intervention shifts in the participants that our partners engaged, we encountered something more subtle through the shifts in ourselves. We discuss this as participative intimacy (Light 2021; Light et al. 2024), below.

6.2 Participative intimacy

A key aspect of our learning relates to intimacy. We were, together, ourselves transformed. Willis suggests that we make our designs, but they make us (2006). Often this intra-action (Barad 2007) takes place over years and decades (as with the influence of digital tools on society), but here we were noticing the roots of transformation in local change happening in months, at meeting points where we joined and reflected. Beyond acknowledging Barad’s philosophy (2007) in terms of understanding findings as manufactured by the questions asked and tools used, we learnt how people can choose to be changed by committing to a worldview and what work it takes. We have been identifying this phenomenon as intimate and call it participative intimacy (to distinguish it from intimacy sought out in domestic relationships, see Light et al. 2024).

What we thought could only happen through physical co-presence (impossible for us, located in different countries) was reconfigured, through the shift to online engagement, as an intimacy that worked across networks. We had the experience of sitting in a game via a video conference or seeing an exhibition piece become assembled in photos across an instant message app group, to hear the story that followed: how others encountered it, what mattered to them, and a sense of achievement or frustration from the producers. We let the encounters engage us, to meet in some shifting point between our specializations. We learnt intimately about collaborators’ knowledges, intentions, and commitments, becoming part of an ecology of practices out of fragments. This was slow evolving affective engagement, because ‘creative work to make change involves staying and collaborating over time, guiding reflection, promoting mutual care and affecting sense of agency …among familiar or soon-to-be-familiar others’ (Light 2021).

We might say that participative intimacy is itself transformative: to come together slowly and variously, with common pursuits and growing respect; to feel an affective bond even as we theorize differently about relations, a form of affective prefiguration (Light 2023), to make the whole greater than the parts (and, indeed, to make the parts fractal, cut from the whole). These were the entangled ambitions. And our project was, in a small way, a model of different research relations and an attractor for others interested in making that difference. The project, by existing, became a question mark, insufficiently radical for our desires yet troubling art, design, culture and sustainability communities by not being aligned with any of them. Against the tightly-bound nature of economics and care practices, inseparable from brutal colonial histories (e.g. Tsing 2015), it really did ask what else might be possible.

6.3 The intimacies of entanglement

The way that CreaTures behaved as something other than a compartmentalized and extractive research project is not unique. Action and practice research exists on the premise of contributing learning to the context in which it is conducted and may be a co-created and hard-to-tease-apart affair, also offering unlearning at the individual and collective levels (la paperson 2017; hooks 1994). But CreaTures was a design experiment and one that attempted to practice what it preached. What might this first step on a journey towards different realities teach a field of enquiry?

Through reporting on designing our project, we have shown how a focus on entanglement can be generative of more than mere coalitions of interest: over time, it can shift collaboration to co-thinking, co-feeling, and co-habitation. We can see that, as we encounter new contexts, maintaining participative intimacy suggests creating safe collective spaces that reproduce the values of patient listening, caring attending, and experimenting together -and there are no short cuts. Even if tools seemingly exist to support a greater reach, care works one person, pair or group at a time and varies across participants and facilitation practices. There are hints that there is more to learn about how to entangle –when to step back, what different types of tangle to encourage and so forth. But, while we can aspire to create intimacy, we can only create the conditions for it; we cannot demand it.

Nonetheless, we have clues for creating these conditions. For example, feeling the rim of the computer on leaving the The Hologram course brought care down to the homely and material after the transports of remote learning about a new anti-capitalist care system. And meeting in the project team (well beyond the hours allocated) for meaning-making work was instrumental in creating the CreaTures mood. We see transformation as diverse and long-term but starting with self-transformation. We can identify the importance of the local and specific even in the greatest existential questions and global matters, linking CreaTures’ practices to CSCW’s situated concerns (Suchman 1993), and linking the global to what is relevant and manageable locally. This means accepting that meaning cannot be abstracted; care does not grow linearly (Eleutério and Van Amstel 2020). So, if we want changes in existential meaning to transform us as individuals, collectives and societies, we cannot neglect on-the-ground processes of interpretation, meaning-making and caring at the point where horizons meet. The biggest social and technical matters collapse into something local and context-specific, revealed through the intimacies of practice and preparing the ground, in turn, for new intimacies. In analysing technologies, this brings together a set of familiar concerns, but with an emphasis on existential dynamics; in designing technologies (and projects), this is an argument for exploring how a concept can be generative in a particular time and place.

CreaTures as an assemblage/idea became a Framework, created as a boundary object (Star and Griesemer 1989; Light and Anderson 2009) for artists, designers, ecologists and sustainability practitioners to appropriate, existing in multiple worlds and open to interpretation by a variety of groups, including funders, for whom the approach became more legible. We hoped to capture the work of coming together as well as producing an output that did not wholly compromise our values. This was not the legitimization of EU reviewers’ approval or simple translation of our politics and concepts for policy, important as these might be. It was presented as a bridge between incommensurable perspectives, building on the paradox of pinning down enmeshed, ever-evolving systems. We remain conflicted about the extent to which we wish(ed) to woo (and conform with) existing structures, however much this might contribute to change. We hope that CreaTures contribution continues to be a problematising of relations, not merely a promotion of methods.

We suggest that this practice of creating conditions for intimacy, relinquishing traditional notions of agency (invoked in using scale as a metaphor, with its simplistic linear notions of impact and implicit incitement to expand) and finding meaning in interdependence is the work of being a responsible researcher at a time when narratives need to change so that the way the social and technological meet to configure our worlds is not left only for markets to determine.

6.4 The work to produce new relations

In describing our attempt at entangled researching in CreaTures and in our study of The Hologram, we hope to have shown how conceiving of entanglement helped us reveal—to ourselves and others—different organisation with different commitments: a different ethos. Entanglement became part of the meaning of these innovations, both in inception and in explaining what has been achieved. It is not separable from the point of the activities. In Schmidt’s sense, both creatively and professionally, it is our work.

We can ask: are we committed to solving a problem, managing a predicament or creating bounteous relations? We prioritized the last at every turn. But we inherited no methodology for making difference using a metaphor. And, even now, we cannot present a full-blown system for the design of cooperative engagements. Only at micro-level, we can propose some techniques that resonate with Barad’s insights, drawing on interpretation and recognizing that metaphor might be a sensitizing concept, in as far as it can become a tool.

We can point to certain practicalities and suggest these form the basis for articulating an ecological view of CSCW (Light et al. 2023), going beyond interest in assemblages to an active construction of a different endpoint. In earlier sections (s4), we listed some tactics we adopted. In summary, our methods to acknowledge irreducibility included:

  • Storytelling forms that portray fluid dynamics;

  • Pluralizing narratives, reflecting multiple orientations;

  • Mappings giving primacy to relations, not things;

  • Exercises to remind ourselves of connections;

  • Reporting of experience, with stress on embodied, affective responses to unseat merely intellectual approaches.

Singly, these methods do not offer new approaches for design to our colleagues and peers. Only seen as the expression of a different orientation and goal do they, together, start to coalesce into a form of connection that speaks for the ethos of entanglement. The combination recognizes our attempts not to reduce phenomena and their influence, but let them breathe in the practices of making interdependence fundamental to organization. Out of this, new ideas, orientations, relations and socio-material practices grow – and only then might novel (computer-supported) tools follow.

We suggest that assembling and giving prominence to creative practice for transformative futures is, itself, a way to transform futures, adding a focal point for attention (and legitimated by its research funding in a way that much art is denied): ‘a form of action research, a site for cross-fertilization, and an attractor for difference’ (Light 2022). The project became its own prefigurative example of different organization as part of attempting to change practices. To create the project was to be the change as well as to research how to make it. Applying this mindset already changes what can be achieved, though, as noted, it was not an easy process.

Regarding the project as a transformative artifact connects it to infrastructuring. In embracing entanglement, we cannot talk of direct impacts, but we can infrastructure conditions for a different ethics to flourish. Attention to relationality is present in Star’s original conception (Star 1999, 2000; Star and Griesemer 1989) and Karasti and collaborators’ implementations (Karasti 2014; Karasti and Baker 2004; Karasti et al. 2010). Perhaps we can infrastructure the chance for new realities by assembling creative practices, de-fragmenting them and supporting co-thinking, co-feeling and co-habiting in assemblies of practitioners. Acknowledging relational ontologies and foregrounding them can create an intense form of collaboration: ‘something greater than any individual contribution …that might feed into new philosophies’ (Light 2022). In creating coalitions and linking them using digital means, there is the opportunity to go from socio-technical as a description of relations to socio-technical as the basis for ethical relations that reject the techno-economic.

Our day-to-day efforts to achieve this are represented in this paper by acts of contextualizing our research narratives, stating positionalities and using individual personal accounts. These acts recognise the whole person as researcher and learner (with no expectation for emotional objectivity to accompany professional analytic objectivity). This approach supported us to slow down and feel, as well as see or hear, what partners achieved and what we could tell of the work. We increasingly understood that it is not gratuitous to live these experiences and savour them; the affective elements – of failure, hope, care, vulnerability, love and enchantment – may be what draw people together (towards intimacy and to make intimacy) and alter them. But this was all an experiment and perhaps the most significant part has been the will to try and the learning that has come with it, which we have attempted to share here.

6.5 Producing ironies

Yet, ironies underpin both The Hologram and CreaTures in their rejection of current techno-economic systems. Both used global technical networks run by commercial companies to support their remote working. Whether legislated for/bought by their organisations or chosen so participants could easily engage, ExPs and researchers used mainstream brands and only a handful turned to FLOSS and managed to be digital without dependence on the (ubiquitous tools of) the companies espousing profit-driven, growth-oriented, scaling strategies, which are elsewhere called ‘deathstars’ (Shareable 2018). This paper is typed on a keyboard that belongs to this deathstar world and was submitted on networks that maintain it. This speaks to Tsing’s “friction” or ‘the grip of worldly encounter’ (2004 p1) and reminds us of Light’s analysis that our research partner-practitioners’ practices ‘are fed by capitalism and exploitation, unable to live in their present form without such corrupting influences, yet intended to undermine them’ (2022 p40). We are applying feral and subversive tactics in the patchiness of Tsing’s forests (2004, 2015) where tensions meet and accommodations are made despite resistance. Our ethics are always in development through these tensions. This is both a frustration and an inevitability; we cannot disentangle ourselves.

Our subversive structures should exist, playing out how something might be if we had different, more ecological, worlds to live in and techno-economic values did not largely prevail. There seems a particular urgency to working in this anticipatory way and acknowledging entanglement helps us manage our complicity in perpetuating broken systems, even as we challenge them. Yet, from the limited description in these pages, it is clear also that a different understanding of influence can create its own influence, shaping what is valued and how we understand our potential for making transformation, and even what transformation is. Using ideas of entanglement introduces these different accountabilities and emphasizes different sensibilities. The politics of entanglement asks us to prioritise the socio-technical over other, more functionalist approaches, and the ethics of entanglement asks us to think deeply about those priorities. Entanglement, as a concept, offers us an alternative to technological worlds of stratification and scale, conjuring a set of tender, more intimate relations, without asking us to abandon all our tools.

With this experiment completed, we conclude that we can design (with) a different ethos than that which inflects mainstream technology development, already begun in acknowledging that that is our purpose, nurtured by others that feel similarly and boosted by seeking and finding meaning in interdependence on a project-by-project basis.