Presentation at UAL - May 14, 2025

📷 Photo by Femi Isiaq

We are delighted to have been invited to deliver two sessions at UAL Creative Computing Institute in London about the Sensing the Forest project targeted at students from Computer and Data Science and AI. It is exciting because it is always nice to reflect upon the project’s journey when presenting it to others. Furthermore, we can learn from UAL’s students and their projects, which also pursue talking to trees using computational tools.

In this first session on Wednesday, 14th May 2025, we presented the general perspective of the project and dug into the behind-the-scenes of Pete’s Dendrophone installation. We combined short talks with a few hands-on activities.

The slides of our presentation are available here.

The main highlights were the following:

• The six themes that have emerged from the exhibition Your Sonic Forest were well received as inspirational prompts to think about their work and also as an example to find themes for their projects.
• The video of the exhibition, which has no words but only sounds from the forest, was acclaimed as a beautiful statement about the power of acoustic ecology.
• Getting to see the full techno-artistic production of Pete’s Dendrophone installation and the follow-up activity of designing a spatial sonification for climate engagement was insightful to think about the different components that need to be considered when designing a sound intervention considering forest data. The students presented great ideas illustrated on the post-its shown in the top header photo.

Luigi will return on Wednesday, 4th June 2025, to give an in-depth perspective of building the streamers (physical design, code, audio engine, dataset…) with 1-2 hands-on activities or take-home tasks.

Acknowledgements: Thank you to Femi Isiaq and Corey Ford for the invitation and to the students for their curiosity during the session.