Cons - Matt (D) was poorly and had to go back to Nottingham for a rest, Robin had compiling problems with the visualisation (not being able to get the new version working on the PC), we didn’t get anywhere with the planned audio test

Pros - The test with Silvia in Rio was successful, we set up a second computer on the side wall with the Brazil visualisation and I think it will work well for the weekend.  We had some really interesting visitors who took part in the human sensor experiment and give us some really valuable feedback about the work… latest data sets to be updated to the website shortly on the YSP page.

Lizzie Haines came to do some audience evaluation, observing the audience interaction, comments and participation in the experiments which will help us understand the success of the residency in terms of participation as well as our own development of the work it is an interesting mix and quite challenging as at the moment I think for us the most succesful activity was the walk, even though we only had 11 people participate on the day.  I suppose it is quality not quantity often with the kind of work we make… but it has helped develop the ideas for the trip to Rio in November, understand how we want the work to be more playful and less ‘worthy’ and how we would develop a mobile sensor kit experience alongside the installation.

But the ideas are definately coming together and it all helps.  I have collected some interesting data for my PhD with the feedback questions on the activity form and really thank anyone who has completed these!!

Day 7:

45 people

40 human sensors

We attempted to put the sensor kit in the big old oak tree near the visitors centre, with help from the technician guys who are great and good drinking buddies.  It worked very strange up in the oak, a slow transmission of data and then I think somehow the logger got switched off, everything had moved around so maybe a squirrel or bird sat on it or the wind shifted things.

We took it down and brought it closer to the studio again, which is easier for me to manage but not such exciting trees.

Yasmin, James and Charlotte from Fermynwoods came along and talked with us about how we could take the first version of the installation there, which would be a great venue.

The afternoon was crazy, 45 people coming in waves over 3 hours.  We managed to talk to most of them and have ongoing people go out to do the activities.  It helped having Robin back and Eva his girlfriend helping too.

Rebecca arrived at the end of the rush and we spent a lovely couple of hours back at the B&B talking through the project, she is also one of our ‘outside eyes’ as well as supporting the project management.  She is an arts facilitator and musician and we focused on solutions for working with the visitors, engagement throughout the project and audio.

Day 8:

10 people

From our chat with Rebecca we decided to do things a little differently and ran an ‘Artists Walk’ from the visitors centre.

Matt Watkins came in the morning, which was fantastic, its been strange working without him and great to get his feedback and talk about developments with him, Lots of good chat, a walk and visit back to David Nash’s work at the gallery.

Weather systems are very strange, the temperature went down to 10.8 and we were wearing jumpers. Strange weather as we know, with all the weather systems moving and catastrophes occurring in Pakistan, North India, China, Russia, Brazil. The detail we are seeing around the tree is such a small micro system compared to the stuff we are hearing from around the world.

But it rained heavily, and then sudden sunshine, yellows, blues and purples appearing in the visualisation.

Some really interesting comments from people, someone said the more they looked at the visualisation the more it revealed.  We are thinking more about the visualisation and how we enhance it for the weekend, with audio, more feedback…

Skyped with Silvia to keep her up to date and talk about the trip to Brazil and residency in EME’s van.  It is a VW van that is a mobile studio and we will visit the school we have been working with in Rio, and some forest areas in Gaunabara Bay, taking some of the work we are doing in YSP there and also hopefully doing a live link up with YSP in November. We also talked a little bit about the live link up this weekend coming and the skype lab planned for Sunday morning with Carlo (Met office climate change scientist).

Today Robin will return and we can start making things, working on the interface, doing some audio experiments…

Last night we went for a drink with the staff at their regular pub and then went back to Archway House to continue our discussions about the work, did lots of diagrams and had lots more ideas, we worked out a schedule for the year in terms of how we want to develop the work and will start building the first phase in September - a mobile tracking device for journeys into forests that we can use for our research and members of the public can use to track their experiences in the forest - as human sensors.

Lots of ideas from the walk, colours, light and shade as well as from some of the sculptures in the park.

20 people

Human sensors, asking people to note down the temperature, humidity, atmostpheric pressure and decibels around an oak tree.

Making a stop motion animation based on the data collected from the visitors.

Live data projected from the oak tree.  The projection worked really well and looks very interesting when it is changeable weather, it was one of those sunshine and shower days, but with real horizontal rain and wind and then suddenly sunshine and blue skys. At one point the visualisation turned yellow with the sunshine, we’d not seen that before.  The temperature as the rain came dropped by the minute and the humidity rose to 99 percent (although we wondered if that was caused by a build up or rain on the sensor).

The activities seemed to work quite well and the animation is building up slowly.

Our ideas are also solidifying.  We still have a big gap between the visualisation and the concepts for a physical sculpture, being pulled between the ability to create a dynamic augmented reality on screen and being tied to a physical space when you create a sculptural experience, we’d like to make the augmented space physical… which we did with Chemical Garden, but I am still unsure what materials would create the ethereal experience that the projection is creating.

Have been looking into CO2 as a solid substance and would like to create a tree out of it but it is lethal, can cause frostbite if you touch it and asphysixation in large quantities, sounds worse than the ammonia we used in Chemical Garden to create the salt crystal trees… I like it.

But not for this, I think this is likely to be mechanics and light, but we are thinking this work will evolve and different outcomes, at the tree (the sensors and speakers that enable you to hear a tree in another location), in the forest (tracking your journey through the forest), in the gallery (visualising and interpreting the data as a sculpture).

Our goal for the weekend is to redo the visualisation so that the parameters are more meaningful, to enable people to ‘decode’ the effect of the data on the image and also to enable people standing in front of the visualisation to interact with it.

We will do some tests with audio to see how we can capture audio from the tree and what kind of sounds we can capture.

Tomorrow we will return to YSP, had a weekend off-ish.

The last 2 days of last week, went well. We had 20 people on Thursday and 32 on Friday. The activities got some really interesting results and some great feedback. The thing that most stood out was a Forester who visited who spoke about the language we were creating through the visualisation of data and said he wanted to be able decode, or understand what the sensor kit was telling us about the tree. Like Carlo, when he saw the visualisations between Sherwood and the Mata Atlantica he said he could tell the health of the tree by the colour, light and it would be great to be able to read the other information too.

This led us to develop an exercise using our bodies as human sensors to decide how we see and percieve the atmosphere, based on our experience or points of reference. We will upload these to the map of the park tomorrow. When doing this exercise another visitor who was a nurse began to talk about some work she had done with patients perception of symptoms and the difference between what they percieve and what they could reveal through medical science.  This was really interesting in terms of what we are trying to ‘interpret’ through the artwork as opposed to simply revealing the scientific data… also reflects back to our previous work Heartlands. In a way this project is the opposite of Heartlands, instead of revealing the invisible inner process as we walk through a landscape we are hoping to reveal the invisible external process and our affect as we walk through a landscape.

Next week will be less reflective and more ‘active’. We will start playing with materials, designs, audio, the data…

visitors to the park adding stories and drawings to the wall

Rachel and Robins setting up the sensor kit in a Birch Tree

In Longside Studio working on ideas

Robin overlooking the park and David Nash sculptures

Stories contributed by visitors

A woman watching the film of the Dark Forest research in the resource room at the visitors centre

16 visitors
Narratives and Tree Stories themes
6 stories added
The morning involved discussions around narrative and the external experience.
Walked to the oak and birch woodland area near Longside Studio.
Talked about tracking visitors journeys in the forest area, GPS, audio or not, visual or not.
I had an idea about using a phone around your neck to track your journey, light and colour, sound and GPS, to give you audio feedback based on the data from the trees, where you are (shade or open sky) and how close you get to the trees with the sensors on.  Using the technology to create a communication between your sensor data and the trees.
Talked about narratives informing the work.  Linear narratives such as stories about trees, wrote stories about tree memories and asked members of the public to tell us or write their stories and added them to the wall.
Stories felt too linear and didn’t really answer our questions about the ‘experience’ but maybe could inform an audio trail. Not abstract enough, but maybe this is something you can whisper into the tree, a memory of a tree from a time gone by?

Was told that the work had charmed one man and had a discussion about the performance of us as artists presenting the ideas of the work, he was very interested in this as an experience rather than just looking at an artwork.
Some of the stories were about smell, particularly interesting when talking about memory.
One couple sat for some time and wrote their stories for us.

Today was a baptism of fire but a good one. Thanks to all the visitors to the park who came and visited us at the Longside Studios, we meet some really interesting people who engaged with the ideas through talking to us, took the flyers to take photos and map the locations where they found trees and made photographic evidence of the things you don’t normally see in the park, the temperature, humidity, sound, light etc…

We had some great drawings done today, a family spent some time escaping the drizzle and making some beautiful drawings and mapping the trees they could see and imaginary trees based on the themes of the project. We will add these to the map in the morning.

We placed the sensor kit in an old oak tree next to the visitors centre but showed the recorded data from our exhibition in Brazil when we linked a tree in the UK to one in Brazil, as this was a good place to start the project. To see the data collected from the tree click here

Tonight after some drinks in a local pub with the technicians who have been alot of support today and a rather dubious plate of stodgy pub food we spent quite a while playing a not very delibrate game of find the big ASDA in the countryside using the GPS on our iphone and half remembered directions from the technicians.

Having stocked up for the week we went back to the idyllic B&B were I am now - to take over their front room and discuss the schedule for the week and begin to really get our heads around what we want to acheive in terms of developing the new artwork, experiments with the public and on site and also activities for the public. It is strange that it was really hard to get any real ideas of how this would evolve before we arrived, now we are here on site and in the environment with the weather and the quiet and the mix of sculptures, woodland and park we are beginning to really get a grip on what this project could be.

Ideas:
We have been talking tonight about the imaginary space that we want to create both externally in the woodland area and internally in the gallery space. This is potentially a set of narrative clues whilst you are out in the environment that are controlled by the data, and a visual, physical installation that is an imaginary world created by the data.

How this will look and be experienced will be revealed over the next few days.

Planned Schedule (likely to change):
Wednesday - starting a chalk animation that visitors can add to and change, visualising how our bodies can act as a sensor, collecting memories of trees and tree landmarks from ourselves and visitors to begin to plan the narrative and adding them to Google Maps, working on visualising the ‘imaginary space’ created by the data. What could this look like, what would the experience feel like? Adding photos and drawings to the map of the park. Live link to a tree close to the Longside Studio.

Thursday - thinking about the indoor experience, what materials we might use and how it might work, continuing the chalk animation with visitors, drawing imaginary spaces and forests, taking photos of things that look fantastical, magical or unreal in the park. Live link to the old oak next to the visitors centre.

Friday - thinking about the outdoor experience, what will the sensor look like in the tree, how can people interact with it? Designing the new sensor kit, writing narratives and designing how this will evolve.  Asking visitors for stories, fairy tales, myths and legends they know about forests.  Adding these to the map of the park and other places on google maps where they think they could come from.

Workshop 1:

The first session in Sherwood Forest was a bright, very cold day. This session was a basic introduction to the forest, the old oaks and silver birch trees that inhabit the forest and also a revealing look at how the forest is at this time of year in England, sleeping, preparing for the Spring, windy, no leaves on the trees, muddy ground and hardly any birds.

After a bit of a wait for the bus driver to arrive we got the bus to the forest and arrived in time to meet Izi and Andy the forest rangers. Andy will be working with us throughout the project, and on hand if there are any questions about the forest itself. They took us on a walk to a clearing in the forest where we found an old, hollow oak tree and did our first task.

Along the way Izi and Andy pointed out different things in the forest, showed us the rings in the trunks of trees that had been cut down and talked about how you can see the ‘life story’ of the trees through the rings, not only it’s age but it’s health, and the conditions of how it was living by the way the rings are formed. It’s like reading palms but for trees.

At the old oak we tried to keep warm whilst I explained the different sensors we would be using and discussed the first task. Everyone was split into groups based on the the different sensors:

Group 1: Temperature

Group 2: Humidity

Group 3: Decibels

Group 4: Atmospheric Pressure

Each group had to go off and find evidence of the effect of each of these elements in the forest and photograph, draw, make notes or

Meanwhile I did a very quick data collection using the sensor device which I set up at the bottom of the tree to collect evidence of what the four elements were at that moment, live.

Testing in the Forest:

Last week I went to run a test with the sensor kit in the forest, before going to Djanogly to run a session with the group.

I found Andy and had a great discussion with him about the forest. He has worked there for more than 30 years and has lots of stories and ideas about the forest, how it has changed and what species, and activity occur in the forest.

I then went to the hollow oak tree that we had been to in the last session and collected some data. It was a very cold day again and hailstones appeared at one point! I attempted to link up with Silvia in Brazil but there were problems with her Internet connection.