Being Weird: Collaboration, Contamination, and Worlding with Nonhumans

By employing “weird” from weird fiction as a mode for imagining encounters with nonhuman beings, my work aims to challenge entrenched beliefs in human exceptionalism and the nature/culture divide. In a creative practice that spans film, sound, and text, I imagine these encounters as mutually “contaminating influences” that can act to subvert our epistemological assumptions and ontological categorisations. In recasting nonhuman entities as agential actors, my work aims to facilitate a process of collaborative worlding, a practice that builds shared fictional realities. My research aims to develop the weird as a conceptual framework that has the potential for transformative and regenerative capacities contained within a more expansive conception of agency and coexistence within a more-than-human world.