23/08/2022

Digital Gardening with a Forest Atlas

During the Participatory Design Conference 2022, Michelle Westerlaken will present a co-authored paper that details the development of the Smart Forests Atlas. The Atlas expands open-data research platforms toward pluralistic and participatory practices, and works with the under-examined practice of ‘digital gardening’ to reconfigure the open-data research platform into a dynamic and participatory space for cultivating ideas and generating content.

+ more info

15/06/2022

Research Opportunity: Smart Forests Postdoctoral Researcher

The Smart Forests project is hiring a full-time postdoctoral researcher to join our team. The position is for 24 months and is based in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. The deadline to submit your application is Friday, 22 July 2022. It is anticipated that interviews will take place during the week commencing 1 August 2022.

+ more info

05/05/2022

AI and Environment

Jennifer Gabrys will present “Sensing Smart Forests” as part of the NordAI seminar series “AI and Environment” on 5 May 2022. The series is curated by Tirza Meyer and Adam Wickberg from the research project “The Mediated Planet” by the Environmental Humanities Laboratory at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. Running February and June 2022, the series features contributions from leading scholars working with AI at the interface between the human and non-human world, exploring the question: what constitutes the environment through the lens of artificial intelligence?

+ more info

08/03/2022

Native Seed in Restoration Workshop

Danilo Urzedo talks about the national native seed survey for landscape restoration in Brazil as part of the Native Seed in Restoration Workshop (8 March). He joins experts from around the world who work in seed-based restoration to discuss issues around native-seed supply chains.

+ more info

24/02/2022

Sound's Colonialities

For “Sound’s Colonialities: Formatting, Recording and Saving on Indigenous Lands”, Max Ritts draws from Smart Forests’ expansive research into forests, conservation politics, and digital acoustics — advancing critical questions into a central interleaving theme: coloniality. We explore how new acoustical monitoring technologies, rapidly being established to legitimately respond to escalating conservation issues worldwide, pose ethical dilemmas and material consequences for Indigenous communities whose lands, livelihoods, and ecological realities can enter their calculations in meaningful yet oftentimes unanticipated ways. This talk is part of Decolonial Research Lab at Talks.cam and takes place on 25 February 2022.

+ more info

23/02/2022

Im/materialities

Jennifer Gabrys will be presenting at “Im/materialities — Structural tensions between AI and the environment” on 24 February. This panel discussion by the JUST AI Network will explore the possibilities and limitations of AI as a solution to the climate crisis. Register via the link.

+ more info

23/02/2022

Media Ecologies

For the Center for Comparative Media at Columbia University’s “Media Ecologies” seminar series, Jennifer Gabrys will present “The Forest that Walks: Digital Fieldwork and Distributions of Site” on 25 February 2022. The series brings together a diverse set of thinkers examining the relationship between technology and the bodies that interact with them.

+ more info

10/02/2022

Instruments of Change

Jennifer Gabrys will speak on the theme “Sensed Landscapes (Mapping Change)” as part of “Instruments of Change” — a multi-day symposium focused on the technological and scientific frontiers of sensing, simulating, and experimentation in the landscape. This session on 15 February 2022 examines the use of both ground-based sensors and aerial and satellite-gathered imagery for mapping landscape change. The series is hosted by the Environmental Modeling Lab (EMLab) at the University of Pennsylvania.

+ more info

14/01/2022

DH beyond the Human

Michelle Westerlaken speaks about multispecies worlds in this “DH Beyond the Human” Lightning Lunch on 14 January 2022. She is joined by digital humanities scholars who research plants, animals, fish and fungi. Hosted by the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative at the University of Toronto.

+ more info

13/12/2021

Digitalization and Restoration

As part of the symposium, “Ecological Restoration and the Conservation of Biological Diversity” on 13 December 2021, Danilo Urzedo examines the digitalization of forest landscape restoration. He particularly explores how technologies impact stakeholder engagement and inequality.

+ more info

03/12/2021

Narratives about Earth

For this “Narratives about Earth” evening of films and talks, Jennifer Gabrys will give a lecture that addresses the topic of the planetary and outlines “Being Planetary as Praxis,” a concept that informs the ethos of her Planetary Praxis research group. Co-hosted by La Loge and Goethe-Institut Brussels as part of the “Constellations for Futures” that investigates ecology, art, community, and science.

+ more info

02/12/2021

Sentience and Smart Forests

As part of the “Sentience” lecture series, Jennifer Gabrys investigates the sensory arrangements that Smart Forests generate. The presentation considers how sensory infrastructures materialize as distributions of power and governance, while detailing the sensory practices of humans and more than humans that transform and potentially re-constitute dominant regimes of perception toward other inhabitations and milieus. Organized by the Centre for Sensory Studies and Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University.

+ more info

18/11/2021

Interrogating Global Traces of Infrastructure

This infrastructure series critically explores infrastructures, with this second workshop focusing on global infrastructures. Jennifer Gabrys will participate in a panel to discuss infrastructure and collective world making.

+ more info

17/11/2021

AI for Earth: Investigating the Social Consequences of Environmental Technologies

With a focus on Smart Forest technologies, Jennifer Gabrys will consider the social consequences of environmental technologies in a keynote presented as part of this series of Cambridge Zero Research Symposia.

+ more info

17/11/2021

Smart Forests and the Vegetalization of Digital Technologies

As part of the Humlab’s 20th anniversary conference at Umeå University, Jennifer Gabrys will give a keynote that explores the digitalization of forests, and how forests become media.

+ more info

29/10/2021

Sonic Eco-Surveillance

Max Ritts presents “Social and Political Consequences of Acoustical Monitoring Networks,” at the Anthropology and Conservation Conference (25-29 October). He reviews some of the general trends exhibited in the “sonic eco-surveillant” turn in conservation, drawing on examples from around the world.

+ more info

21/10/2021

Sensing Smart Forests

As part of the event, “Human Entities 2021: Culture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” Jennifer Gabrys will present work on “Sensing Smart Forests.” The talk will be presented online, but held in the open-air environment of Palácio Sinel de Cordes, Campo Santa Clara 142-145 in Lisbon, Portugal.

+ more info

08/10/2021

Re-constituting the Sensory Infrastructures of Smart Forests

As part of the “Sense Ecologies” panel, Jennifer presents “Re-constituting the Sensory Infrastructure of Smart Forests” at this year’s 4S virtual conference in Toronto (6-9 October). She discusses forests as sensorized environments. Whether in the form of camera traps to monitor organisms or 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. This presentation asks how sensory infrastructures materialize as distributions of power and governance while considering the sensory practices that transform and potentially re-constitute dominant regimes of perception.

+ more info

08/09/2021

Watch Trishant Simlai talk about conservation surveillance

Surveillance technologies such as drones, camera traps and long-range thermal cameras used for conservation monitoring are increasingly also used to control and repress local communities. In Trishant Simlai’s plenary talk at the Drone Ecologies workshop, he discusses the socio-political implications that these surveillance techniques are having on the different communities who live near the Corbett Tiger Reserve in Uttarakhand, India. You can view the talk here.

+ more info

07/09/2021

Listen to Michelle Westerlaken on the Animal Turn podcast

Michelle Westerlaken talks with The Animal Turn host Claudia Hirtenfelder about her research on multispecies design. Michelle reminds us that “forests are more than trees. They are multi-species ecologies that can be looked at from all the different species above the ground, under the ground.” The conversation can be listened to here.

+ more info