Speaker Bio
From participatory design research to immersive artistic practice, the work of Associate Professor Francesca Valsecchi is a visual ethnographer for profession and a data wanderer for attitude: she enjoys exploring new territories behind numbers. She has been living in China for more than a decade. Francesca Valsecchi looks at developing the “green sense” as the next liminal space of human perception and cognition. She works in Shanghai at Tongji University, College of Design and Innovation. She established the Ecology and Cultures Innovation Lab to discuss and experiment on more-than-human design and the challenges of post-development paradigms. Research includes published, speculative and exhibition works about mapping ecosystems, ethnography of waterscapes, ecological data, and urban-nature interaction. She has an ongoing artistic practice using alternative photographic processes and bio-media. She is an environmental activist.
She travels extensively in space, time, seas, and fantasies.
ICPR 2024 Abstract
Substantiated Spaces: the invisible geographies behind substances
The use of drugs influences the experience of selves together with their relationship with the environment. Traces of this alteration of experience are narrated in the form of written self-reports by users. Among a broad and diverse collection of online and offline narrative accounts of the consumption of psychoactive substances, Erowid.org is one of the most esteemed repositories of such stories, with decades of journeys published in the Vaults
Performing a network analysis on the database of the Erowid report, this project presents substances from the point of view of the complex experiences they elicit, by the outcomes of maps and diagrams. A series of network maps derived from natural language analysis and graph theory performed on Erowid reports create a systematic substantiation of set & settings and interactions of substances. The maps bring unseen and otherwise inconceivable networks of relationships that the individual reading the reports perforce fails to provide. The overall intent of the network visualisations is to maintain as much scientific value as possible through a solid scientific methodology documented and well-grounded to explore the textual qualitative expression of self.
The analytical method gives credit to the reports as a fundamental corpus of knowledge, made by users and shared in the spirit of compassion and peer support. We give credit to all the experiences as individual manifestations but also as contributions to a collective space of experimenting with consciousness.