Walking as research method when investigating environmental landscape through film and photography

As a filmmaker and photographer, Heidi Morstang take part in interdisciplinary research projects that investigate environmental change in landscape and is using walking a method in various ways. In this seminar, she will present examples where walking has been a key method to her as a filmmaker as well as by the scientific researchers featured in films.

Examples will be taken from the film 47˚C, that encounter two world-leading climate change scientists who study the changing ecology and habitat of one species of butterflies in Sierra Nevada, USA. The film Pseudotachylyte portrays geoscientists searching for visual signs of earthquakes on a mountain plateau in the Lofoten Islands, Norway, and in Thinking Space we follow a world-leading mathematicians who use walking as a conceptual space. New work from Svalbard from the research project “Expanded Rephotography – XR-storytelling and visualization” (led by Prof. Tyrone Martinsson, University of Gothenburg), will also be presented.

Dr Heidi Morstang's artistic practice encompasses moving image, photography, and experimental documentary. She is interested in developing visual methods by working on interdisciplinary projects that concern environmental change.  She uses images to explore and offer insight into complex and often subtle tensions and conflicts that characterize places, however beautiful our environment they might appear.

As Associate Professor in Photography at University of Plymouth, Morstang leads the International Environmental Arts Research Network. She has exhibited her photographic work and screened her films internationally since 1995, and her work is represented in several private and public collections.

If you want to participate in this seminar, please contact us.