Sensing the Forest for Ground @ Creative Coding Utrecht - November 22, 2025

In November, Creative Coding Utrecht dedicated a month to engaging with a central question:

How might technology and the living world coexist?

The Zoöperation, based in Utrecht and operating as a Zoöp, spent the month exploring how their organisation, and the technologies they use, participate within and impact living ecosystems. Through a series of interventions and workshops, they explored this understanding: an electric clay workshop where participants created PCB boards with the earth itself, an arcade featuring electronic waste transformed into instruments, and installations that positioned technology as one voice within a much larger living system.

I was there for the closing events, presenting and performing with Sensing the Forest through a Sound Ecologies Meetup, Walkshop and a MultiSpecies concert.

Ground Finissage

The Sound Ecologies Meetup and Walkshop revolved around the idea that attunement begins in the effort to actively listen and consider our role in our environment. The event kicked off with a reflective sound walk, hosted by Werner de Valk, asking us to consider ecological listening and the relationship source and causality has in sound. Matthias Hurtl presented Listening to the Cracks which is a long term sound based citizen science project which seeks to use sound recording and composition to identify the multi species life in the gaps and edges of the city. I presented Sensing the Forest’s artistic interventions, exploring how acoustic ecology and ecological listening offer ways of engaging more deeply with the forest soundscape. Friso Wiersum and Bart Witte presented their project Nightwalkers, wherein they practice collective night walking through urban spaces in search of the relations between participants and the land around them, attuned to what the urban landscape obscures and controls through its lights, surveillance systems, closed storefronts, and curtained windows.

Multispecies Concert

Later on, there was the Multispecies Concert, a trio of multimedia performances that continued the day’s themes. The concert kicked off with Niels Gräber and Isaac van der Aker’s Mudcell Composition, using Sunjoo Lee’s Electric Garden. The fluctuating voltages of the fermenting bacteria in each mud cell shaped elements of the live piece, showing how humans might co-create with electrogenic bacteria. This was followed by Sunjoo Lee and Kohran Erel’s Sonified Garden, an audio-visual piece built from recordings of the Electronic Garden captured through electromagnetic mics, hydrophones and a Pocket Scíon—devices that reveal a sonic world inaccessible to human perception. The sound extended and developed alongside a nature-inspired visual accompaniment. Finally, I presented a Live Coding SuperCollider piece using the rich dataset recorded as part of Sensing the Forest project. Machine Listening techniques were used to shift between the forest’s own voices and the hidden patterns that emerge when technology interprets them.

Takeaway

Not only did the entire Ground programme highlight how technology might be thoughtfully integrated into living ecosystems through community science, artistic and scientific interventions, but also how they might come together to reveal the multidimensional forces which act on our relationship with the living world. From the Zoöperation’s organisational model to the sonic investigations of the closing events, each project offered a different lens — ecological, acoustic, participatory — through which to perceive and engage with this coexistence. What emerged was not a single answer but a deeper understanding of the complexity at stake: that meaningful change requires listening across disciplines, species and technologies alike.

• For more info on Zoöp’s: https://zoop.earth/en/
• Thanks to @fadeddream for pictures
• Thanks to Fabian, Martina and the rest of the CCU crew for their hospitality and the amazing work that you do!