How are forests becoming digital environments? The Smart Forests project investigates the social-political impacts of digital technologies that monitor and govern forest environments. In October 2022, we launched our research platform the Smart Forests Atlas—a living archive and virtual fieldsite exploring how digital technologies are transforming forests. The Atlas platform includes open data from the […]
How might planetary research and practice contribute to collective yet divergent responsibility for planetary troubles? The Planetarities series investigates the rise of research and practice that attends to earthly and planetary concerns, which are unfolding at a time of multiple environmental crises. Drawing on, extending and reworking Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s notion of “planetarity”, the series […]
Environments are increasingly sites of pollution, extraction, disaster, and development. Citizens of Worlds: Open-Air Toolkits for Environmental Struggle examines how citizen-sensing technologies and practices observe, evidence, and act on environmental disturbance. By focusing especially on how people use sensors and sensing technologies to monitor air quality, this book asks: Who or what constitutes a “citizen” […]
Air quality monitoring has increased rapidly in the past decade in response to concerns around the health effects of pollution. Air quality monitoring networks usually have a regulatory function and are typically managed by government agencies, sometimes in collaboration with academic institutions and scientists. Large and expensive equipment typically forms the sensing infrastructure of these […]
A living archive and virtual fieldsite exploring how digital technologies are transforming forests. The Smart Forests Atlas is a research platform developed through the Smart Forests research project, which investigates the social-political impacts of digital technologies that monitor and govern forest environments. Our research project considers how forests and technologies are co-constituted. Rather than advocate for smartness, […]
AirKit is a toolkit that allows citizens to sense air pollution, gather observations, and communicate stories and proposals for improving air quality. Developed from 2019 to 2021, AirKit builds on longstanding Citizen Sense research to provide a comprehensive citizen-sensing toolkit for monitoring air quality. The AirKit project identifies and develops opportunities for realizing the social […]
Planetary crises are contributing to the stress and loss of forests, while in other areas forests are expanding due to climate change. Yet the question of “what is a forest” runs through numerous environmental research and policy discussions. Forests are not singular or self-evident entities. Instead, they are composed of many mutually constituted relations. Far […]
Air pollution is a planetary health emergency. Air quality monitors are not always located where air pollution is occurring, and citizens might have many reasons to gather data to document and analyze air quality. Airsift is a platform to analyze citizen data. Citizen Sense developed the AirKit toolkit for communities to set up citizen-sensing networks. This toolkit includes […]
The AirKit Logbook has been developed as a resource for learning more about air quality and air pollution. It is part of the AirKit toolkit for citizen-led air quality monitoring. The Logbook is available through Github or as a webpage and PDF. There is a short version of the Logbook available as a quick start guide for setting up a Dustbox 2.0 […]
What if environments are not an external separate object to be known, but rather are the very processes and conditions through which subjects materialize? In defining Environment for the Technologies in Practice Lexicon, I explore a re-articulation of environments as dynamic and interdependent webs of humans, organisms, technologies, and collectives to consider the multiple entities […]
In a time of catastrophic climate change, the “planetary” often refers to a universal figure, scale and approach to earthly troubles. Yet how are the planetary and planetary subjects not self-evident entities, but rather forms of collective responsibility in the making? By engaging with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s analysis of the planetary, and Sylvia Wynter’s reconsideration […]
The Industrial Revolution has written its signature on the Earth. The acceleration and proliferation of fossil fuel use, factories, transport, and human populations have changed the growth and ecology of mosses and lichens. For the digital exhibition Feral Atlas, I explored the ways these vegetal sensors register the effects of climate change and signal threats […]
I contributed the essay “Sensing a Moving Planet” to Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth. Co-published by MIT Press and ZKM, and edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, this monumental volume captures the disorientation of life in a world facing climate change. It traces this disorientation to the disconnection between […]
Walking is a practice that often centers humans as moving and experiencing subjects. Whether on solitary rambles or in collective social and political engagements, people are central to understanding places on the move. However, multiple organisms and environments are also involved in moving practices. For this article and accompanying talks, I decenter human movement to […]
Forests are increasingly sensorized environments. Whether in the form of camera traps to monitor organisms or the Internet of Things to detect wildfires, there are an array of sensor technologies that observe and constitute forests in relation to scientific inquiry, Indigenous land claims, environmental governance, and disaster prevention and mitigation. For “Human Entities 2021: Culture […]
An investigation of how-to guides for sensor technologies Sensors are increasingly common within citizen-sensing and DIY projects, but these devices often require the use of a how-to guide. How to Do Things with Sensors explores the ways in which things are made do-able with and through sensors and further considers how worlds are made sense-able […]
“Powering the Digital: From Energy Ecologies to Electronic Environmentalism,” In Media and the Ecological Crisis, edited by Richard Maxwell, Jon Raundalen, Nina Lager Vestberg (New York and London: Routledge, 2014), 3-18. Pre-proof version of “Powering the Digital.” Electronics and all that they plug into are energy intensive. Energy is another form of waste, like electronic […]
A selection of exhibitions, 2001 onwards: “Citizens of Worlds.” Installation of Citizen Sense materials for the exhibition, “Highly Sensitive.” Curated by Wendy Walls and Judy Bush. Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne. Melbourne, Australia (April 2022). Read the exhibition catalog. “Dustbox and AirKit.” Installation of Citizen Sense Dustbox and AirKit material for the physical […]
Sensors are everywhere. Small, flexible, economical, and computationally powerful, they operate ubiquitously in environments. They compile massive amounts of data, including information about air, water, and climate. Never before has such a volume of environmental data been so broadly collected or so widely available. Grappling with the consequences of wiring our world, Program Earth: […]
Through the use of sensors, networks and data collection, the Internet of Things is meant to make everyday practices and infrastructures more efficient and “sustainable.” Yet these digital technologies also generate new material and environmental effects, particularly through increasing amounts of electronic waste. After first addressing emerging developments within the Internet of Things, this chapter […]
In a 1970s science-fiction tale set in London, Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater, plastics are undergoing a curious transformation. Products made with the novel plastic Aminostyrene, a compound cooked up by scientists that has a molecular structure halfway between protein and polystyrene, are beginning to melt. This material, which makes up degradable bottles as well […]
When one thinks of monuments, inevitably visions of solidity and stone come to mind. Ozymandias tipped over in a drunken fit of ambition, transformed into a pile of desert-marooned rock. Cleopatra’s Needle on the River Thames in London, a study in endurance and process that cryptically withstands centuries. And so the rocks, fossils and new […]
Within current schemes for green cities, which span from urban wildlife initiatives to city agriculture and green transport networks, citizen sensing and smart cities projects are emerging that attempt to realize improved sustainability through greater urban connectivity. As another layer of infrastructure that enhances the efficiency and timing of cities, digital connectivity presents the […]
This edited collection explores the material politics of plastics. From food punnets to credit cards, plastic facilitates every part of our daily lives. It has become central to processes of contemporary socio-material living. Universalised and abstracted, it is often treated as the passive object of political deliberations, or a problematic material demanding human management. But […]
As part of transmediale 2013 BWPWAP, I participated in a panel on the newly published text, Depletion Design: A Glossary of Network Ecologies, edited by Carolin Wiedemann & Soenke Zehle. Fellow contributors Marie-Luise Angerer and David M. Berry discussed aspects of depletion and exhaustion during the panel. My contribution covered the topics of “Natural History” […]
This project, “’Citizen Sensing and Environmental Practice: Assessing Participatory Engagements with Environments through Sensor Technologies” (Citizen Sense), is funded by a European Research Council (ERC) starting grant, and led by Principal Investigator Dr Jennifer Gabrys. The project will investigate, through three case studies, the relationship between technologies and practices of environmental sensing and citizen engagement. […]
Plastics are material substances often condemned for their inability to biodegrade in the environment. New forms of plastics have been developed with capacities for biodegradability, a material strategy that is meant to remedy the (visible) problem of plastics accumulation. This paper discusses the distinct types of work undertaken by humans and more-than-humans in the material […]
Discussing an urban walking event, “Moss-Eye View,” held in the City of London as part of This Is Not A Gateway (TINAG, October 2010), this paper considers the ways in which cities may be understood from the view of more-than-human processes and incorporations. The walk explores how new insights emerge into ways of “becoming urban” […]
Numerous creative strategies now exist for materializing energy in order to reduce energy use. In a parallel way, social science research at turns engages with the materialities of energy as a strategy or formation that influences participation in energy use. This paper asks how specific materialities of energy are articulated across these social science and […]
The use of wireless sensor networks to study environmental phenomena is an increasingly prevalent practice, and ecological applications of sensors have been central to the development of wireless sensor networks that now extend to numerous ‘participatory’ applications. How might environmental sensing projects be understood as giving rise to new practices for sensing environmental processes, and […]
I presented recent work on citizen sensing and environmental computing as part of the “Sense of Planet: The Arts and Ecology at Earth Magnitude” symposium, an event organized by Jill Bennett and Douglas Kahn at the National Institute for Experimental Arts (NIEA), University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia (25 August 2012). The presentation drew […]
“Citizen Science and the Politics of Sensing,” was a presentation I delivered as an invited keynote speaker for “The Citizen Scientist on the Move: Digital Play, Politics and Epistemology,” a co-hosted event held at the University of Utrecht and Waag Society Amsterdam, Netherlands (25-27 June). In this presentation, I focused on creative practice engagements with sensing […]
As part of the Regionale 12 event in Murau, Austria, Weather Permitting is taking part in “Kühllabor” / “Cooling Station: Worldwide Geoengineering and Local Weather-Making.” The event is curated by Klaus Schafler in collaboration with Christina Nägele, and runs from 25 June – 21 July 2012. Kühllabor is an arts-sciences exhibition focused on planetary and […]
Within climate change debates, writers and scholars have called for expanded methods for producing science, for proposing strategies for mitigation and adaptation, and for engaging with publics. Arts–sciences discourses are one area in which increasing numbers of practitioners and researchers are exploring ways in which interdisciplinarity may provide a space for reconsidering the role of […]
The 2012 version of Pixelache took place as “Camp Pixelache” from 11-12 May at Arbis in Helsinki. The main theme for the unconference was “Do It With Others” (D.I.W.O), and addresses practices of co-production and collaboration. Some of the speakers for this event include Marc Garrett of Furtherfield, Owen Kelly, and Pedro Soler. The Finnish […]
The trophic ecologies of cities play a distinct role in how urban matter—and particularly urban waste matter—biodegrades. Insects are key participants in eating, breaking down and “recycling” refuse, and at the same time waste sites provide unique ecologies for insects. While first sketching a picture of the some of the distinct insect ecologies that may […]
“The Politics and Affect of Environmental Computing” was a working group that I participated in at the Field_Notes / Cultivating Ground arts and sciences environmental data workshop, hosted by the Finnish Bioart Society and held at the Kilpisjärvi biological station, Finland (26 September – 2 October 2011). During the workshop, I focused on the […]
This review article surveys the complex terrain of the imagination as a way of understanding and exploring the manifestations of anthropogenic climate change in culture and society. Imagination here is understood as a way of seeing, sensing, thinking, and dreaming that creates the conditions for material interventions in, and political sensibilities of the world. The […]
Digital Rubbish is a study of the material life of information and its devices; of electronic waste in its physical and electronic incarnations; a cultural and material mapping of the spaces where electronics in the form of both hardware and information accumulate, break down, or are stowed away. Electronic waste occurs not just in the […]
This walking tour, which took place as part of the This Is Not A Gateway festival 2010, surveyed the prevalance and range of byrophytes in the City of London.