About Data Vitality

Open Forest

Andrea Botero (Aalto ARTS) / Markéta Dolejšová (Aalto ARTS) / Jaz Hee-jeong Choi (RMIT-AU) / Cristina Ampatzidou (RMIT-EU) 

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.

Andrea Botero is an Academy of Finland Research Fellow at Aalto University – School of Arts, Design and Architecture / Department of Design. Her work engages with the possibilities and contradictions of participating in the creation of environments, tools and media that afford more relational and caring interactions among, and between people and their environment. 

Markéta Dolejšová is postdoctoral researcher at Aalto University – School of Arts, Design and Architecture / Department of Design working for the CreaTures – Creative Practices for Transformational Futures project. She is a design researcher working across the inter-related domains of eco-social sustainability and food system transitions. 

The Open Forest activities have involved generous input from:

Sjef Van Galeen, Lachlan Sleight, Helen Walpole, Kate Geck, Siobhan McCarthy.

https://creatures-eu.org/productions/open-forest/