the wearable

Anticolonial, feminist Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR) is “working to do science differently,” studying plastic pollution and its legacy. [14] Based in Newfoundland, Turtle Island (Canada)—the ancestral lands of the Mi’kmaq and BeothukIn—CLEAR freely offers two open source tool designs for independent plastic pollution data gathering. 

These options range in price starting around $8, for their iconic BabyLegs, up to $500 for more complex tools. [15] These are equitable options for researchers working with less, or no, institutional funding. They are also detailed and readily available sources to better situate oneself and, in my eyes, can be framed as a sensory public art practice.

CLEAR’s main intention is upholding Indigenous knowledge sovereignty in their approach to data collection. Who is seeing the data first, and what are the hierarchies in science studies? They are constantly calling in these questions from Donna Haraway in her text Situated Knowledges:

“How to see? Where to see from? What limits to vision? What to see for? Whom to see with? Who gets to have more than one point of view? Who gets blinded? Who wears blinders? Who interprets the visual field? What other sensory powers do we wish to cultivate besides vision?” [16]

In tending with, I was inspired by this framework and it was important to start with an accessible tool to participant in the practice

Echoing the relationship with dance and being-with: what if this tool was embedded into my body?