Alys Daroy

In the early modern era, shaped by expanding systems of scientific, theological and colonial order, the polypus (octopus) proved remarkably resistant to imaginative and epistemological capture. This paper examines how these cephalopods were represented in early modern manuscript and print illustrations and their classical and medieval inheritances. Whether rendered as marginal ornamentation, monstrous enigmas or zoological specimens, the octopus's material and cognitive unruliness animated complex visual and conceptual negotiations. We explore how these images, including a folio from Kitāb al-Ḥayawān, a medieval Latin manuscript, a fifteenth-century copy of Oppian's Halieutica and Ulisse Aldrovandi's engraved polypus in De Mollibus (1606), among others, stage encounters that are as affective as they are epistemological. While previous scholarship has often foregrounded the mythic or proto-scientific aspects of marine imagery, few studies attend to their ecological and emotional dimensions. Drawing on the eco-aesthetic and eco-cognitive framework of affective ecology, we argue that the liminal octopus'; fluid morphology and ambiguous agency blur the boundaries between knowing and feeling. In eluding visual and conceptual fixity, it performs a poetics of disturbance where fear and fascination coalesce. Amidst early modern anxieties about the sea's unknowability, the octopus becomes a figure of entangled perception, one that gestures toward enchantment even as it foreshadows extractive and classificatory violence. In an era of accelerating biodiversity loss and marine collapse, such unruly objects offer not only historical insight but a vital reminder of artistic enchantment as a mode of attention and wonder. Written and presented by Dr Alys Daroy and Dr Elizabeth Burns-Dans. Panel: Early Modern Unruliness. Convenor: Dr Susanne Meurer.

This creative research output mobilises historically informed performance as a methodological lens for climate-responsive adaptation, testing how early modern theatrical aesthetics, such as live music, candlelit intimacy, and the sensory conditions of indoor late Renaissance playhouses, can be reactivated to think through contemporary ecological crisis. By situating Twelfth Night within a distinctly Western Australian coastal imaginary, Gretchen E. Minton's Salt Waves Fresh translates Shakespeare’s preoccupation with shipwreck, fluid identity, and maritime uncertainty into an embodied exploration of climate precarity, rising seas, and environmental instability. The production advances adaptation as an epistemic practice rather than a representational update, demonstrating how early modern dramaturgy can function as a critical apparatus for environmental humanities research. As the first staging of this adaptation in Western Australia, the work intervenes in local Shakespearean performance history while contributing a regionally specific model of eco-adaptive theatre that aligns global Shakespeare studies with place-based climate discourse.

This conference presentation contributed to an invited collective session associated Stanislavsky and Research Methods (ed. Stefan Aquilina), which foregrounds reflexive and methodological approaches to theatre and performance research. The paper advanced an eco-critical and biophilic reconfiguration of Stanislavsky, proposing “eco-Stanislavsky” as a methodological framework for contemporary practice-led and interdisciplinary research. Drawing on biophilia theory, embodied cognition, and environmental humanities scholarship, the presentation reframed Stanislavsky’s principles of nature and liveness as ecological processes shaped by material environments, sensory perception, and more-than-human relations. Positioned within wider debates on research methods in theatre and performance studies, the paper argued that Stanislavskian practice offers a productive site for rethinking methodological reflexivity in the context of climate crisis, ecological awareness, and environmentally responsive performance-making.

How might ecological performance practices reanimate Double Falsehood as a dynamic, environmentally conscious work while preserving its dramaturgical and historical integrity? This exploration investigates Lewis Theobald’s Double Falsehood (1727), purportedly derived from Shakespeare and Fletcher’s lost The History of Cardenio (c.1613), as a case study for exploring adaptation, Shakespearean afterlives and ecological performance. Responding to the conference theme Shakespeare in Spirit, the session situates Double Falsehood as a text haunted by its contested authorship and identity, engaging participants in an interrogation of spectral presences and uncanny tensions between adaptation and unadaptation. Discussion foregrounds ‘doubling’ as both a thematic and practical strategy, exploring how doubling, manifesting in paired lovers, mirrored betrayals, co-authorship and a dual aim of innovative performance and ecological messaging, amplifies thematic resonances and scenographic solutions. Building on this, the session will unpack how staging choices rooted in biophilic sustainable design based on natural patterns and principles and expressed through emergent technologies might evoke the play’s forest as an otherworldly landscape while reflecting on how ecological performance can reshape the haunted landscapes of Shakespearean drama.

This paper investigates the intersection of eco-dramaturgy, Shakespearean villainy and botanical precarity, exploring how Shakespeare’s infamous antagonists resonate with the extraordinary yet vulnerable dynamics of carnivorous plants. By examining the behavioural mechanisms of critically endangered Australian species, this interdisciplinary study considers how these botanical entities function as metaphors for survival, exploitation and environmental fragility. Drawing on ecocriticism and ecological performance studies, we propose that the behaviours of carnivorous plants, such as trapping and consumption, offer a compelling ecological lens through which to reinterpret Shakespeare’s calculating but also ambivalent figures within the play’s landscape. We consider the ways in which these characters’ strategies and power dynamics align with the captivating yet precarious existence of these plants, whose survival depends on both their agency and their vulnerability within delicate ecosystems. Through applying ecological textual readings, eco-performance and pedagogical methodologies, this research contributes to Shakespearean studies’ vibrant engagement with urgent ecological concerns. Discussion further reflects on the role of interdisciplinary creative practice in advancing environmental advocacy, artistic intervention and cross-disciplinary scholarship. This paper forms part of a larger project integrating botanical art, eco-performance and public engagement to reimagine Shakespeare’s villains through an ecological framework, amplifying awareness of endangered plant species in an era of ecological crisis.

Increasing public awareness of ecologically degradative practices is essential for supporting sustainability transformations in the Anthropocene. As the world’s dominant land use, agriculture embodies unsustainable characteristics and practices exceeding planetary boundaries (Campbell et al., 2017; IPCC, 2020: 7). As industrial agricultural systems increase in scale, intensity, and move further beyond the visibility of urban centres, awareness of the commonplace nature and makeup of agribusiness decreases (Zeunert, 2024a,b,c,d). The extent of food systems’ negative ecological impacts warrants closer public scrutiny (Campbell et al, 2017; Poore & Nemecek, 2018; IPBES, 2019; Benton et al, 2021 Zeunert, 2018), a task that can be assisted by systematic environmental communication modes visually communicating scale and impact.

Sustainability and environmental citizenship is of central importance to visual culture, which can perpetuate capitalist industrial economies at the cost of the more-than-human world (Greenwalt & Creech, 2018). Imagery can evoke profound emotional and intellectual affect (Holm, 2020). Socially motivated image-making through visual communication mediums such as photojournalism or documentary filmmaking can connect seeing with action, witnessing with deliberation, and visual representation with political action (Latour, 1986: 9; Fish & Zeunert, preprint).

This research responds to a current lack of systematic visual evidence beyond satellite imagery conveying Australia’s current state of agricultural landscapes, as well as a dearth of innovative methods connecting consumers with agricultural landscapes. It explores how digital methods might improve agricultural and food literacy through linking consumers to the environments that produce their foods. It focuses on Australia as a case study of industrialised agriculture, having wider application to global landscapes similarly impacted by agribusiness. Australia offers a useful case, with industrial practices dominating yet obscured by geographic distance from urban centres, a lack of inclusion in State of the Environment reporting, ag-gag legislation, and pervasive idealised rural imagery failing to convey frequently degraded states of food production environments (Zeunert, 2024a,b,c,d).

Research is grounded in a visual sociology methodology that developed novel methods of harnessing drone technology, creative visual capture and subsequent dissemination of all major Australian agricultural elements. Discussion centres on Zeunert’s original critical dissensus (2023) archive titled ‘Food Landscapes Australia’ (http://foodlandscapes.com.au/) that distils 10,000 drone aerial captures from 38,000 kilometres of a continental-scale field research of Australian agriculture into 881 cinematographic videos within an interactive online assemblage. The method captured all major Australian commodity typologies by value and spatial area. Footage spans all Australian states and territories, commodities, major industries, and commercial farming scales. The interdisciplinary and original creative research work thus explores how digitalization can advance visual communication methods to promote sustainability transformations of agrifood systems requiring disruption (Oels, 2019). Though focusing on the Australian context, research methods have wider application to communicating Western agrifood systems’ landscape impacts.

The research contributes to shifting profit-centric major agribusinesses narratives through a disruptive and innovative socio-technical archive seeking to catalyse sustainability transformations by facilitating visual agency and affect (Forno et al, 2022). It furthers digital communication methods for sustainability transformations through increasing consumer awareness of agribusiness’ environmental impacts, while systematically illuminating states of Australia’s agricultural environment. Separation between food consumers and agricultural production environments results in shadow practices that might otherwise be considered unacceptable if more visually perceptible and if links between industrial production chains were better articulated and understood (Plumwood, 2008; Zeunert, 2024c).Creative digital methods and communication modes can produce counter imagery to heighten comprehension and interrogate the status quo of agri-food industries.

Informed individuals and consumers are important for food sustainability choices (Kirveennummi et al., 2013: 89). Increasing the visibility of industrial agriculture’s scale and effects and linking foods and production landscapes can assist increasing producer and consumer accountability of sustainability ramifications, ecological consequences and animal suffering directly linked to food choices. The critical dissensus aerial digital archive ‘Food Landscapes Australia’ (FLA) offers a model of a counter image repository to challenge agriculture’s existing dominant visual narratives through drone cinematography revealing landscape degradation by industrial agribusiness.

Agriculture is routinely perceived as bucolic, benign or beneficial, while behaviours of wild species are often understood as reflecting natural patterns. Anthropogenic underpinnings of food systems and animal behaviours can be invisible in standard cinematography without multi-modal cues to increase perception and prompt deeper understandings of less apparent forces. In Grained responds to the need for creative, practice-led research inquiry to prompt deeper interpretation. An interdisciplinary collaboration spanning landscape studies, sound design, filmmaking and performance reveals how industrial food systems reconfigure place, species relations and crucially, our perceptions of such entanglements. Focused on the Ord River Irrigation Scheme on Miriwoong and Gajirrabeng Country, this original audiovisual work stages deceptively bucolic drone footage of sorghum harvesting contrasted by suggestive glitching visual intrusions and a two layer sound design with scripted performance. Visual and sonic material suggests layered socioecological infrastructures—remaking catchment scale ecologies for freshwater capture and redistribution, visible and hidden architectures of industrial agribusiness, empire and racism, labour and capital flows, and multispecies codependence on agri-systems. In Grained combines original and archival cinematography, place-attuned sound design, scripting and acted audio performances and gallery staging with dedicated props to invite sustained, embodied attention and slow contemplation. It was exhibited at Form Gallery in Claremont, Perth, 30 Oct–25 Nov 2025 in an exhibition titled ‘Transversal’, curated by Moving Image Lab Perth (MILP). Eleven artists works’ spanned video art, expanded cinema, and experimental documentary, and were refined during a laboratory residency.

The story of Sydney’s metropolitan food landscapes is one of dramatic transformations of First Nations land amidst jostles for power and wealth. This book unearths Sydney's lost commercial agriculture since colonisation in 1788 to assess its fragile food futures. Richly illustrated, 270 images are encapsulated within 110 figures, including an array of original metropolitan-scale mappings. Discussion traverses the city’s diverse cultural influences, from Indigenous land management to British pastoralism, Chinese cultivation of Sydney’s “backyard vegetable garden” and southern European farming spawning billion-dollar empires. The region has further been shaped by a vast array of cultural and ideological factors and material practices, with relevance to planning, policy, ethics, geography, heritage, art, design and technology. This book is the first to bring Sydney’s disparate post-colonial food histories together in one volume to explore the dynamics and tensions between urban growth and food production. The relevance of Sydney’s food landscapes therefore extends far wider than the city itself, with implications for countless regions worldwide in a time of increasing climate and resource precarity.

Industrial agriculture exerts significant ecological pressures, leading to biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation, and biocapacity drawdown. Environmental impacts are often concealed due to physical (remoteness from city centers) and conceptual distancing (romanticized portrayals through advertising), hindering agricultural transparency. This article documents a creative digital methodology developed to communicate the scale and environmental impacts of industrial agriculture and to link consumers’ food choices with their sources. Research centers on the creation of “Food Landscapes Australia,” an interactive digital dissensus archive designed to expose the environmental consequences of the country’s agri-food system. The methodology integrates systematic spatial-statistical analysis, typological classification, continental-scale field research, a visual method for drone-image capture, and the immersive online dissemination archive. The archive includes 881 curated cinematographic drone videos, distilled from over 10,000 images captured across 38,000 kilometers of field research, systematically framing Australia’s agricultural activities and environmental impacts. Findings reveal the potential of these digital methodologies to produce high-resolution, incisive visual evidence that challenges dominant agri-food sustainability narratives, exposing often-concealed practices. The methodology, therefore, offers a contextually adaptable approach for sustainability researchers, educators, and policymakers to enhance environmental communication of agricultural impacts. Outcomes foster public awareness and critical reflection on sustainability issues and, by bridging the gap between production landscapes and food consumers, demonstrate the potential of digital tools for encouraging informed discourse and decision-making around sustainable food systems.