Open Forest at Data Vitality Exhibition

Open Forest is an experimental inquiry into various forests and forest data sets. The work consists of a series of performative actions, observations, and speculative research instruments (including sharing of forest-stories online) that come together as an interactive installation at Data Vitality. In the project, we walk with various forests, including a highly instrumentalized forest field station in Finland and an urban forest in Australia that both generate a variety of open data, a protected forest area in the Czech Republic, and forest gardens, or chagras, in Colombia. The work invites participants to reflect on the relationships between various entities and creatures with different connections to forests, such as scientists, citizens, city officials, sensors, environmental data, trees, and the overarching climate crisis. One of our aims is to expand the landscape in which data and stories about forests can be told, and care about them enacted.