Thrilled to begin this project – and to speak to some of the ideas and discoveries along the way – I trust it will be both a useful personal journal and of interest to others who may wish to engage in similar journeys 🙂
Forest Art Intelligence (FAI) aims to understand how to develop art forms capable of growing and evolving alongside a regenerating forest, whilst also actively benefiting that forest’s health: in collaboration with Samford Ecological Research Facility (SERF) and the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN).
The extraordinary intelligences that underpin natural systems will inspire and direct the development of our experimental sci-art process. Our aim is to understand how to develop art forms capable of growing and evolving alongside a regenerating forest, whilst also actively benefiting that forest’s health. We envisage embedded artworks capable of slowly finding, and then occupying, their own intelligent ‘niches’, within the forest’s ecology – a speculative form we call an ‘Art Intelligence’.
Our art+science team have secured unprecedented permission to restore a currently cleared block of land back to high conservation-value forest at the partner’s site, Samford Ecological Research facility (SERF). As the forest ecology slowly returns to health, we will investigate how to develop symbiotic, process-based artworks across that entire site. We imagine that these ‘Art Intelligences’, would be capable of growing & evolving with the forest whilst occupying their own intelligent, ecological ‘niches’ within that emerging forest – with the forest itself being the project’s ‘meta-artwork’.
Our project’s actions, & our on-site creations are therefore intended to directly benefit the forest through both ‘performing’ ecological functions, whilst also encouraging public engagement with the forest’s processes of intelligent natural regrowth.
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