Reimagining Environmental Sensing

This project re-imagines what it means to sense and make sense of our changing environment, employing artistic research, cutting edge technologies, and speculative media design to realise an alternative vision of how we may come to know and narrate shifts in climate and ecology.

In partnership with the Institute for Safe Autonomy at York, the creative centrepiece of this project is a ‘kite drone' that will carry aloft an AI powered sensory payload that is designed to process both visual and atmospheric data. The kite itself affords a simpler and more sustainable alternative to motorised drones for persistent aerial observation, while harking back to its historic role as a key platform for atmospheric sensing, prior to the advent of powered aviation.

Aims and Objectives

Nevertheless, the project’s primary contribution is less about the mechanism of flight but the nature of meaning as it manifests within environmental sensing. A key critical and creative goal is to interrogate the persistent gap between climate data as a numerical construction versus the felt experiences - affective, incommensurate, uncertain - of the changes being indicated.

Moving beyond gathering standard telemetry, the AI aboard the kite is tasked with a highly speculative function: using its multimodal capabilities to compare and correlate real-time environmental data with a stored library of literary and social accounts of climate and ecology. The system therefore does not simply log the information detected by its sensors, but searches for narrative and imaginative resonances between the numerical registers yielded, the material processes and transformations behind them, and written human reflections concerning our relationships to a changing planet.

The resulting outputs will manifest as multimedia collages of interlinked text, images, maps, and raw data, downloaded at the end of every flight. These will be curated and displayed as part of a dedicated online visualisation, as well as in printed materials for public exhibition. Each collage will invite audiences to explore the relationships between environmental data and their own experiences, as well as consider another vision of AI as a form of ‘EI’ (‘Environmental Intelligence’, to use a term coined by Sabina Leonelli), in which the focus is on contributing thoughtfully to a challenging future - centring attention, concern, and care for the Earthly environment, rather than fuelling escapist fantasies of techno-industrial domination.

While the primary intention here is artistic rather than scientific, the project will assess the technical potentials of using low-powered, low-footprint AI systems to perform complex data correlations in real time, and so consider what the future may hold in this regard.