Zoöp Nieuwe InstituutZoöp Nieuwe Instituut

Relating to the lifeworlds of other-than-human entities is a central effort of the movement of Observing & Sensing. This is a key task of the Zoönomic Foundation in actual zoöps, but all humans involved in zoöps should acknowledge other subjectivities as relevant for the organisation of a zoöp.

Next to sensing the lifeworlds of nonhuman living entities, it is also important to observe how different legal or organisational bodies that constitute or relate to the zoöp perceive their surroundings. What signals are they attuned to? What is their sensory capacity? What events trigger their repsonses?

Multisensory, aesthetic observation is a learning process, in which more capacity for sensing is developed. As Brice Ammar-Khodja puts it in the observation of Zone Sensible: "In the beginning, you only see the obvious bees, then it turns out that the colorado beetle is a local pest and is much more important for the day-to-day running of the place."_ _Observing & Sensing also implies becoming sensitive to one's own presence in the zoöp. This leads to the awareness that humans need to be given new specific places and roles in the multispecies networks.

While humans with their sensory abilities have a unique capacity for synthesising different experiences into larger cohesive impressions, their perception is also constrained by the abilities of their senses. Various instruments may enhance these abilities, and certain observations can be outsourced to instruments that measure, register and signal developments of their own accord. Different knowledge practices developed in the arts, the posthumanities, the sciences and in economy have to meet and intersect each other in the synthesis of these observations. Qualification and quantification shold be treated as complementary processes. Actual zoöps use a variety of instruments, each working from a different knowledge practice to monitor the development of their operational sphere.