About Rootling
Rootling [verb]
Pigs rootle to eat, play, and know. As omnivorous animals, they use their snouts to disturb the soil, uncover foods and understand their environment and other pigs. Rootling is curiosity and exploration. This website is a playground for rootlers. Consume playfully, haphazardly, disruptively, and from a variety of sources, and learn about pigs in their many guises, capacities, and relations with humans.
A practical guide to rootling.place
Drag your mouse or finger on a touchscreen to move across the landscape. If using a phone, holding it horizontally and using your thumbs works best. A wild pig accompanies your exploration. Forms, colours, and ideas shimmer and pulsate beneath the surface. By repeatedly clicking you can unearth and discover the content beneath. The more you rootle, the more the landscape becomes diverse and vibrant.
There is a huge piggy landscape to explore
keep clicking to unblur the tiles and open a post
Keeping your nose and perspective close to the ground makes you attentive to detail. As a rootler, you can adjust your perspective by zooming in or out. If you have acquired a taste for a certain subject, follow its scent across the landscape by selecting a tag.
The menu cards on the left-hand column can be viewed as a list or grid, and help you track what you have uncovered already. You can also use the menu as another mode of rummaging through entries. A percentage bar below tracks your progress.
About pigs and method
The posts are intellectual nourishing, sometimes with contradictory flavours, occasionally silly, and often delivering surprising insights about pigs. Many entries are short. Digest them quickly and move on by following their link or re-entering the rootling place. Some posts are longer and in-depth and require more time to mull over, chew, and process.
As you rootle around this website, over time a multifaceted porcine portrait that defies singular characterisation will begin to take shape.
Rootling is also a perspective on and a method for learning and doing research. Distributed across the landscape you can find a text broken up into 10 critical reflections unpacking why the term "rootling" was adopted, the logic of the website's design, and how it is a method of doing research. The entire text is tagged under ROOTLING and can be accessed here
Credits & Terms of Use
ROOTLING/The rootling place is a website of the ERC BOAR Project, and was conceived by the sounder. Rootling.place was designed in collaboration with Jaan Sarapuu and Sven Raju, art directors and coders of WWW Stuudio. The content is predominantly written by the sounder, with some contributed by the ERC BOAR project team.
If you would like to cite this website, learn about copyright, and other terms of use, click here. If you would like to contact us, click here
The website is published and hosted by Karolinum Press, the university press of Charles University in Prague.
