The Anthropocene is increasingly discussed in public debate as individuals and societies become more conscious and calculative of human impact on Earth systems. A plethora of consumer technologies are available to measure human movements, tracking locations, paths and activities, while positioning the individual’s actions at the center of focus. However, these measures are often quite distanced from the experience of an event, or are seemingly unconnected to the global anthropocentric systems that individuals are being measured against and compared to. In this paper we reflect on recent creative workshops with communities in Melbourne about how place and location is ‘known’ through affective, multisensory and mediated measures. We invited people to playfully ‘measure’ their movements and relationships to place: thinking about daily commutes through urban landscapes, or imagining human scale against tourist landmarks. Presenting excerpts of video documentation and resulting collaborative artworks that were exhibited, we investigate the tensions between standardised measures (formal western knowledge apparatus) and the affective measures that people draw on when moving through certain places. We argue that creative, generative and participatory approaches is key to developing situated and inclusive forms of knowledge on how individual movements are tied to the broader global concerns of the Anthropocene.

In Australia, there are few case examples of successful political movements that prefigure alterity through collaborations between diverse actors. Too often, allied movements between Aboriginal and settler people become pre-occupied with a representational politics of recognition that fails to enact embodied notions of Indigenous reciprocity and sovereignty. What would it look and feel like if settlers learned to become effective allies within already-existing Aboriginal infrastructures? Successful activism in and around Broome in recent years serves as one exemplar case of a place-based collaboration, regarded by some ‘to be the most significant, and successful, Indigenous-green alliance in Australia’s history’ (Muecke, 2016 p. 252). Crucial to this collaboration is the taking-place of an affective pedagogy that Aboriginal activists teach white environmentalists / anti-racists. Through learning to be affected by country, temporally ordered thinking shifts to a more spatial-atmospheric understanding of being. Bodies dwell in spaces where a more relational way of knowing accounts for the contingent nature of being-in-the-world (Coulthard, 2014). This paper explores the flows of affect across difference that entangle country in the politics of Indigenous-green collaborations, enveloping human and non-human actors in a placed-based affective ecology.

In an era of planetary urbanisation and anthropogenic climate change there is a need for new perspectives on place. In white settler societies like Australia such perspectives are crucial to unsettle top-down planning approaches underpinned by histories of imperialism that centre possession and control. Drawing on the seas/oceans as a conceptual foundation and participatory visual methods, this paper aims to speak back to these land-based imaginaries of place. In particular, the paper focuses on affective ecologies that entangle the diversity of life and non-life along the coast of the small tropical city of Darwin. Caring for Country by Larrakia women Rangers and Listening to Old Man Rock are events that call for a particular mode of attention. Using these events as an entry point, the paper weaves a multisensory fabric of belonging and coexistence that makes it possible to speculate about how we might live better as we encounter the dynamism and the unpredictability of the world. Because such speculative thought is grounded in diverse ways of thinking, feeling and knowing place, it contributes to the ‘art of life’ that anticipates political, ethical and aesthetic futures that are about living better together with human and more-than-human difference.