A Living Archive of Rice Field Reciprocity
Our resources draw upon the etymology and original meaning of the word ‘resource’, to rise again, from the Latin resurgere. What we document here is resurrection, resurgence, the continuous rising of materials through cycles that feed forward rather than draw down.These resources are part of a living, digital archive documenting the ongoing transformation of post-harvest rice materials, such as husks, straw, and agricultural byproducts, into regenerative design possibilities.
Our approach for documenting process is a creative one, drawing on a rich genealogy of archival practice, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson’s pioneering work in Bali during 1936-1939 transformed how anthropologists approached documentation, analysis, and archiving of cultural materials, establishing visual methods as crucial tools for understanding human societies. Their innovative use of photography, audio-visual, and extensive field notes produced multiple layers of documentation; forms of inquiry in their own right. Building on this legacy, UK project lead, Dr Britta Boyer, undertook a three-week training supported by the The International Bateson Institute, working directly with Nora Bateson and a global community of warm data practitioners to deepen understanding of its practice. Nora Bateson defines warm data as “trans-contextual information about the interrelationships that integrate a complex system“.
Our i-lab collective approach to exploring rice ecologies captures the stories, rituals, ceremonial timing, emotional bonds, seasonal rhythms, and situated knowledge that became a practice of warm data in itself. The archive you’re encountering isn’t fixed documentation but a dynamic practice of gathering, observing and experimenting with post-harvest rice materials and what they’re teaching us about cyclical abundance rather than linear consumption.
The archive continuously adapts and adjusts as teams work trans-contextually, cross-culturally and across disciplinary boundaries. Through our collective warm data lens, the archive becomes an active, evolving space of creative adaptation where learning emerges through the interweaving of material experimentations, ancestral wisdom, and contemporary design practice across time and place, recognising that to intercede in a system of post-harvest rice waste, requires attending to the inter-relational processes between people, land, ceremony, and more-than-human kin; the resources themselves, rising into new relationships, new purposes, new life.