Think Outside the Human Box: Interspecies Creativity

In awe of nature as our creative partner.

For centuries, we humans have treated the natural world as something to be used up, a pretty background for our selfies, or at best a source of creative inspiration and retreat. But a growing movement is challenging this human-centric view by engaging directly with plants, animals, and environments as creative partners and collaborators.

Shane Mendonsa is part of that shift; a composer who went from scoring Bollywood movies to improvising alongside an unlikely ensemble – living plants. Mendonsa uses sensors attached to leaves to drive synthesizers, allowing the plants' bioelectrical signals to shape the music in real-time.

It requires really listening and being completely present. I can't impose my expectations, I have to accept each moment as the plants express it."

-Shane Mendonsa

This openness to authentic dialogue across species is at the heart of his botanical music-making.

Mendonsa is part of a growing group of artists, designers, and researchers exploring what's being called "more-than-human collaboration" – the act of decentering human perspectives to engage creatively and respectfully with our non-human kin. From visualizing animal "superpowers" to simulating how horses see, this work challenges our assumptions about our human supremacy.

For designer and researcher Alan Hook, this represents "an exercise in empathy" that can reshape how we understand our role on this vibrant, multi-species planet. His "Equine Eyes" project allows humans to briefly experience the world through a horse's panoramic visual field and unique color perception. The prototypes he developed help us better understand how the species experiences the world. Playing with this empathy could inform new ways of building for inter-species inclusivity in the future.

What might the future look like through the eyes of a horse?

Equine Eyes - Alan Hook

“We understand the world from a very fixed human-centric point of view … so [we] can’t really understand what it must be like to be a different creature.”

- Alan Hook

While these simulations can never fully replicate another being's subjective experience, they crack open an "imaginative space" to ponder how our fellow more-than-human friends experience life. At its core, more-than-human collaboration is an act of decolonizing perspective, challenging the narrative of humans being the only main characters of the story of this planet.

Anthropocentrism literally means ‘human-centered’. It speaks to the belief that humans are the only living things possessing any intrinsic value, and all other living things hold value only in the way they serve humans.

Some examples of how anthropocentrism plays out in our day to day:

• Humans treating nature only as a ‘resource’ to be extracted for progress and development.

• Environmental problems being solved purely by technological innovations.

• Categorizing animals based on the degree of intelligence we perceive them to have.

The concept of collaboration with nature is a direct reminder that the natural world is populated by wise, reactive beings with their own coherent sensibilities, as indigenous knowledge systems have long understood.

From this perspective, more-than-human collaboration is not a novelty, but a profound reframing and deep remembering. As Mendonsa's plant music reminds us, creativity arises not from individual genius but from attunement to the plurality of experiences always unfolding around us.

The human is far from being alone.

With kindness and curiosity,

Laura

PS. Check out these more-than-human masterpieces!

The Mosquito Translator by NonHuman NonSense

Equine Eyes by Alan Hooks

Goldenrod by Shane Mendonsa