The Fallen Clouds project explores the metaphor of a cloud as a way to connect two contemporary issues: the growing expansion of digital infrastructures and the climate crisis, crossed by forms of historical extractivism in certain territories. The project locates the ethico-political tensions between technological development and the eco-social crisis in three critical digital zones and infrastructures in Chile: a submarine Internet cable extended in the coasts of the Pacific Ocean, the new Google data centre in Cerrillos, and the carbonate plants of lithium in the Atacama salt flat. In each territory, the project authors engage with different beings affected by the presence of these infrastructures: from crabs in the submarine bottom to an ecofeminist group in Santiago and Lickanantay women in Atacama.

The Fallen Clouds film

The Fallen Clouds features a film composed of images of these different beings and the diverse processes happening around the digital infrastructures. The film narrative starts with a submarine observation of a new fibre optic cable extending throughout the coasts of the Pacific Ocean in Chile. It then follows the activist actions of MOSACAT (Movimiento Socioambiental Comunitario por el Agua y el Territorio) – an ecofeminist group organised against the installation of a new Google data centre in Cerrillos that would use 169 litres of water per second to cool down its servers. Finally, the film observes the extraction of lithium in the Atacama salt flat from the perspective of a geologist and three Lickanantay women: a girl, a woman, and an elder.

The film sound is recorded using different sound artefacts, from direct sound captures to contact and hydrophone microphones. Experimenting with sound tactilities allows the creation of viscous and electric sound compositions that support the narration of different myths, as told by MOSACAT and the Lickanantay women. From these materials, a ‘cloud symphony’ is born. The symphony is played through floating sound sculptures created with the materials gathered around the three infrastructures explored, including a salt flat crust, water pipes from the lithium extractive sites, dried seaweeds from around the fibre optic cable, and a piece of a fibre optic cable itself.

Each piece is connected to a speaker or to a transductor, generating a vibrating sound composition of The Fallen Clouds. This visual, sonic and material experience allows viewers to immerse themselves in a trance-like journey to break the spell of the cloud, inviting them to take a different perspective on digital technologies and imagine other possible futures connected to circular temporalities as well as interspecies and intercultural affective relations based on mutual care.

Filming & fieldwork

Prior to the film shoot, the authors conducted fieldwork in the three main locations. In January 2022, the fieldwork research took place in Cerrillos, at the territory where the new Data Center of Google will be located. The group worked with MOSACAT on the scriptwriting process in order to better understand their needs, demands, and desires connected to the film.

In February 2022, the group traveled to San Pedro de Atacama to attune to the local territory and generate collaborative bonds with local communities (who were previously familiarised with the project). These encounters involved a meeting with Karenn Vera Tito – a Lickanantay woman and educational mediator, and Juan Carmelo – a traditional environmentalist educator and a fellow friend of Karenn from the same indigenous community. The Fallen Clouds authors made a ritual of asking permission from the land and the ancestors to start developing the project and visited the land of their ancient abuelos (great-grandparents).

In April 2022, the group worked at the Lickanantay school of Río Grande with Ashley, the only ten-year-old student of the school, and her teacher Isabel Tito along with the traditional educator Juana Anza and artist Andrea Vera. Together with Karenn Vera Tito who acted as the educational mediator of the process, they applied different ludic dynamics to create a myth connecting the idea of the ‘cloud’ and its local socio-environmental resonances with the Lickanantay cosmovisions.

The filming continued in the Atacama Desert, starting in San Pedro de Atacama, a town located 2,408 metres above sea level. The work involved members of the Lickanantay community of Río Grande in the Chaxa lake, a place characterised by a rich and unique ecosystem and a sacred site for the local indigenous communities (the site is currently administered by the Toconao community, who kindly allowed the access to film in this place). The filming then continued in the centre of the Atacama salt flat close to the lithium extractive sites.

Film editing & installation

In May, the group followed the installation of the new submarine fibre optic cable Prat owned by the local telecommunications company, GTD, and recorded sounds at the seashore of the Pacific Ocean to capture the audio textures of places around the submarine cable. The film editing started in June 2022 and was followed with the construction of the final atmospheric installation.

During the fieldwork and filming process, the different materials that make up the ‘cloud’ were collected – algae, salt flat crust and water pipes used for lithium extraction. Different sound artefacts were used to create the vibrant cloud composition, including speakers of different sizes and transducers, accompanied by diverse fabric materials and other equipment to hang all the objects and speakers to create the final immersive art installation.

The installation including the film was exhibited at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain (June – July 2022) and at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria (September 2022).

As complex ecosystems, forests provide an environment for living and dying for many species: they are places of refuge, myths, folktales, and sensorial excitements but also sites for control and industrial extraction of natural materials. The modern, western traditions of forest management and environmental policies tend to see forests as a resource to be leveraged to improve human lives: for instance, through timber yields and stocks or carbon sink cultivation. Increasingly, and particularly in urban environments, forests are used to protect – not all but a small number of select – humans from perils of ecological disasters such as high temperature, ozone, and other health-related consequences. In these challenging times, there is an urgent need to better understand, care for and imagine better forest futures.

Open Forest aims to provide a space for co-creative engagements with such imaginaries, by inviting diverse forest creatures including forest dwellers, Indigenous forest guardians, healers, scientists, data managers, artists, designers, as well as dogs and trees, to walk together and share their forest stories. The experimental inquiry involves a series of feral, situated and interrelated activities that aim to entangle the currently available – mostly quantitative – forests datasets with more messy and eclectic more-than-human data. 

Feral ways

The Open Forest inquiry is inspired by feral approaches to creative research practice, where feral broadly denotes the alternative, open-ended, spontaneous, more-than-human, unruly, and wild. In their Feral Atlas, Anna Tsing and colleagues use feral to describe, “a situation in which an entity, nurtured and transformed by a human-made infrastructural project, assumes a trajectory beyond human control.” Playing with the feral metaphor, Open Forest uses feral creative approaches to invite unexpected encounters that may unfold beyond full researchers’ control. These feral approaches connect creatures of diverse shapes, backgrounds and origins and bring them together into a convivial exchange that might result in surprising relations as well as unintended consequences. Emerging from such open-ended, unexplored, and ambivalent contexts, feral engagements carry the potential to shift existing power relations, reaching ‘beyond domestication’ and ‘beyond the Anthropocene’, and challenging dominant ontological and epistemological discourses. The Open Forest’s feral practice is navigated by diverse forest creatures who shape the co-creative activities and emerging more-than-human relations.

Experimental walking-with

Following feral approaches to creative inquiry, the Open Forest walks are performative, centred around the elements of surprise and curiosity. Since autumn 2020, the Collective has organised forest walks in various parts of the world, including (what is known today as) Finland, Australia, the Czech Republic, Colombia, and the United Kingdom. In each location, together with a growing number of collaborators, the Collective experiments with different walking formats and approaches: participants walk both physically and remotely, together and apart, sometimes with actual forests and sometimes through data-based representations of them. Local trees and other forest creatures are considered participants, in both the walking and the larger eco-social phenomena happening in and around forests, such as mass extinction and climate change. 

This relational walking-with follows various types of ‘maps’ with diverse points of interest and is guided by various human and non-human navigators with good knowledge or sense of local landscapes. Some walking guides share narrated trivia about the local forest area; its culture, species and history, which then serve as key points of the walking route. Other guides use their own sensory instincts and invite participants to follow without any predefined route. Following these diverse walking formats and guidance, each Open Forest walk revealed previously unknown aspects of a local landscape and its creatures, including trees, moss and carbon sequestration sensors. The walks create a space for experiential learning about various forests, shifting the focus toward knowledge shared by diverse walkers.  

Feral Map of forest stories

While walking, participants observe, smell, touch, taste, and listen carefully to their surroundings; they take pictures and notes and talk to each other. These conversations and observations become an inspiration for forest stories, which are shared via the online Feral Map. The map serves as a growing public archive of collected forest stories, making the walking experiences available for further reflection and asynchronous engagement.  

The Feral Map stories come in diverse formats and shapes. Some are personal accounts of human-forest relationships expressed in words and pictures, others are numeric datasets capturing, for instance, an exchange of volatile organic compounds between a forest and the atmosphere. 

The initial version of the Map drew upon Urban Forest open data maintained by the City of Melbourne and later grew to include tree datasets from multiple forest areas around the world. Each forest patch where the Collective organises their walks is added to the map as a new location to share forest stories. However, map contributions are not limited to the walked-with patches only, and a story can also be added anywhere outside of these locations. Anyone, not only participants at the walks, can share their stories, thus contributing to an evolving dataset of situated forest experiences and impressions.

As a feral artefact, the map invites inputs and interactions beyond the scope of the Open Forest project. Aside from the walked-with forest patches, the map hosts various venues and creatures coming from other, similar creative inquiries – such as the Open Urban Forest garden and the Nocturne altars. The map can also support various activist and everyday-life endeavours: for instance, the waking guides in Colombia have been interested in using it to further disseminate their local activist, biodiversity preservation efforts.

The Open Forest Catalogue – a physical book presented at Open Forest exhibitions, workshops and other public events also allows for the sharing of stories. From the Feral Map and Catalogue, collected stories (over 100 in total so far) serve as forest data, capturing situated experiences and perspectives of forest stakeholders coming from diverse geographical, cultural, professional as well as biological backgrounds. This evolving, ‘messy’ Open Forest dataset can help raise questions about power, values, and structural inequalities that shape forests and their futures and, by extension, help us to make better sense of complex eco-social phenomena such as climate change. 

Walking locations and forest patches

In Finland, the walks have (since September 2020) been situated in the SMEAR II – Station for Measuring Ecosystem-Atmosphere Relations in the historical Hyytiälä forestry field station in Juupajoki and in the Sipoonkorpi National Park near Helsinki. The walks in Hyytiälä have been performed under the guidance of two Collective members who previously interviewed several forestry researchers and data scientists working at the station to learn about its history and the research performed there over the past 30 years.

While walking through the highly instrumentalised SMEAR II forest, the guides share these anecdotes, showing details of sensors and other research instruments that gather data about various exchanges between trees, soil, and the atmosphere. Walkers are invited to reflect on what these forest exchanges can mean to whom, imagining, for instance, what did the cloud whisper to the forest canopy?

One Finland-based walk took place in the Sipoonkorpi National Park in October 202 and followed the guidance of local forest healers from the Terveysmetsä (Health Forest) initiative. The hybrid walk invited participants to join experimental forest activities such as plunging their faces into the moss floor, observing local forest creatures with a magnifying glass, foraging for herbal tea ingredients, and offering gifts to the forest. The aim with these activities is to get a more intimate knowledge of the local multi-species ecosystem. 

In the Czech Republic, an ongoing series of walks initiated in July 2021 takes place in Central Bohemia, in the protected landscape area Křivoklátsko, which presents a unique ecosystem with a mosaic of species-rich habitats.  

The Bohemian guide Chewie, a Collective’s member of canine origin, navigates the walks while following his extensive sensorial knowledge of the local forest landscape: walkers need to trust Chewie’s sense of direction and wait for what will come their way. This feral walking approach can appear, to a human researcher, without any purpose to arrive at somewhere specific – the experience of drifting through the forest becomes the goal in itself. Yet, the more-than-human guidance opens a space for new, surprising experiences, inviting the walkers to explore forest spaces and situations that they might never discover otherwise. It can help reveal what can we learn as humans if we give up on our control over our daily space-time movements and try to attune to a rhythm and interests of a local non-human creature.

Staring in July 2021, the Bohemian walks have been performed as an ongoing series (over 50 walks so far). A special walking event Walking with Feral Forests, Creatures, Stories took place at the Uroboros 2022 festival, where Chewie guided a group of festival participants through some of the Křivoklátsko paths and helped to provoke a co-creation of forest stories.  

In Australia, the walks took place in the Melbourne urban forest – a complex ecosystem of more than 70,000 trees each with unique IDs that provides a peculiar context for inquiry into open and alternative forest data.

The Melbourne walks (May 2021) were guided by a set of dérives, developed through three co-creative workshops with participants of diverse backgrounds, and inspired by the  Situationist International’s dérive strategies. The Collective incorporated these into their More-than-Human Dérive portal that explores new ways of sensing and mapping of local landscapes using expanded, multisensory ideas of data to include diverse more-than-human ‘voices’ and perspectives.

The first dérive drift through the Melbourne urban forest took place in May 2021 at the Melbourne Knowledge Week; the second one happened at the online Uroboros 2021 festival and invited participants to drift remotely, via the portal. 

In Colombia, the Collective walked with forest patches in three different locations, including the Bëngbe Uáman Tabanoc – an ancestral territory of the Kamëntŝa people located in southern Colombian Andes, the Reserva El Palmar – an ecological reserve located in the buffer zone of the Chingaza National Park in the Andean Mountains, and the Cerro Seco – an informal housing neighborhood located at the southern urban limits of Bogota (December 2021 – June 2022).

In Tabanoc, the walks (December 2021) were focused on local forest gardens, or chagras, and guided by Kamëntŝa women who tend the gardens as part of their common, day-to-day life. The chagras, planted and maintained according to the traditional Kamëntŝa ecological knowledge, served as a walking map: what grew there at the time defined the key points of the walking routes. During the walks, participants learned how vastly different the Kamëntŝa approach to forest caretaking is from the modern, western forest management strategies that rely on high-tech sensing and quantified data measures (as encountered e.g. in the SMEAR II walks).

In Reserva el Palmar, two walks (May 2022) were organised with students from the Universidad de los Andes and guided by Jaime and Cristina Avellaneda, local eco-tourism service founders who drew the walkers’ attention to the local páramo ecosystem and its history marked by extractivist industrial development and bio-conservation issues. Following the walks, the participating students engaged in a dérive drift to get a better sense of the local environment and captured their experiences as forest stories.

The Open Forest walk in Cerro Seco (June 2022) followed two activists from a local initiative drawing attention to illegal extractivist mining processes and land degradation happening in the area. Participants explored the local environment, which hosts one of the few relics of sub-xerophytic and high-altitude dry tropical forests as well as numerous sand mines. While walking, they learned about the complicated political history of the area and present bio-conservation struggles and shared their impressions via the Feral Map. The guides have been interested in using the Map to further disseminate their efforts to stop illegal extractivist mining processes in the area and reach a broader scope of audiences, beyond the local area. 

Two hybrid walks were organised in the Ouseburn Valley in Newcaste (UK) as part of the Participatory Design 2022 conference Situated Actions program (August 2022). The Collective members acted as guides and walked the conference participants through the Ouseburn forest patch, sharing trivia about the local history as well as their personal experiences with various forests around the world. Participants were invited to bring their boundary objects representing what a forest means to them and share the stories behind the objects with others.

Open Forest Installation

The Collective set up an interactive installation as another entryway to engage with the project that has been showcased at various public events. The first iteration was planted in an abandoned retail space A Bloc (Espoo, Finland), as part of a collaboration with the Baltic Sea Lab project. Here the Collective worked for six months (November 2020 – April 2021) and interviewed various forest stakeholders including forestry researchers, tree physiologists, artists, and forest data managers about their relationships with forests. The installation was further showcased at various exhibitions and festivals, including the Research Pavilion #4 Helsinki (June 2021) where it accompanied two guided walks with the SMEAR II station in Hyytiälä.

In November 2021 – February 2022, some insights from the unfolding Open Forest inquiry were showcased at the Data Vitality exhibition organised at the Dipoli Gallery, Aalto University.

In June 2022, the Open Forest installation was planted at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain; followed by the Helsinki Design Week 2022 – Designs for Cooler Planet showcase in Espoo, Finland (September – October 2022). 

The project Open Forest is ongoing and it keeps walking – see the News section below for upcoming walks as well as documentation of past events.

Reference works like dictionaries, glossaries, and thesauri usually give an elite group of experts the authority to assign meanings to words, even though the language is a dynamic social thing. The Glossary thinks of language as belonging to no one in particular and to everyone at the same time. Anyone can participate, and there are several public invitations to do so. 

The Glossary author, artist Amira Hanafi, brings a radical understanding of “common” to the project. They understand language, as part of the commons, as a site where displays of power are continuously produced and contested. Rather than produce fixed definitions, the Glossary distributes power to define language throughout the community or collective that interacts with it. 

The Glossary tools – games, a website, workshops, and person-to-person interactions – capture the drama of everyday acts of linguistic co-creation. These tools are built to facilitate and document continuous linguistic interaction: Meaning becomes plural and fluid, and the lexicon is constantly changing. The tools are also metaphors, which enact some of the processes of change that the lexicon is meant to describe.

The website includes open-source, real-time text editors and games that request input from users who can contribute words or definitions, edit existing ones, or remove definitions entirely. Every contribution is meticulously documented via a real-time database, and users can witness each other making meaning simultaneously. Equally important, histories of these interactions remain freely accessible to any user on the site. The database feeds into the interconnected parts of the site, creating a hidden web of linguistic interaction that resembles real-life language acts. The website makes these interactions visible, which under other conditions might remain hidden.

The games that exist on the site are also played at workshops and other co-creative occasions. Examples include a Glossary workshop organised at the Uroboros 2021 festival as part of the CreaTures Feral track (May 2021), a workshop organised in the context of the CreaTures Plenary including researchers from the CreaTures team (September 2021), and a workshop with a group of experts in climate change and sustainability organized by RMIT Europe (November 2021). Three additional workshops took place in April 2022, inviting diverse public audiences including high school students. The Glossary project was also exhibited at the CreaTures Festival in Seville, Spain (June – July 2022).

The Glossary has multiple interactive functionalities:

Build vocabulary: A game played in workshops and on the website, adapted from the Rapid Word Collection method developed by linguist Ron Moe. Moe’s method is intended to assist language communities in capturing the words and meanings of their languages. It uses a series of semantic domains and related questions. This project utilizes the semantic domain of change and associated prompts, such as, “What is a word used to describe a big change?”

The game also generates questions that align with the research aims of the CreaTures project, about the practices, tools, feelings, and impacts associated with transformational change. The terms generated by the online game feed into the Playground feature of the site – a free space where users can organize words and create word communities, which later appear elsewhere on the site as ‘related terms.’ Users can click on words in the communities to navigate through the glossary. The user-generated vocabularies can also be read as short narratives.

Interview with a word: This game asks players to become words, to embody and speak as them. When played in person-to-person interaction, an interviewer asks the word questions, becoming a collaborator in making meaning. In digital play, the computer asks interview questions selected from an array of questions that were developed during interpersonal play.

Print the glossary: A function to allow users to produce a text version of the glossary, containing definitions as they exist on the site at a particular moment. The glossary is open, fluid and changeable, both in its definitions and in the set of terms that it defines.

Real-time collaborative text-editing: The website dynamically produces a real-time collaborative text editor for each term that is added to the platform. Users can see the existing definition for a term; they can also choose an ‘edit’ button that allows them to add to, change, or erase part or all of the existing definition. For users who are hesitant to disturb existing text, a simple input box asking, “What does this term mean to you?” offers a straightforward, additive way to make a contribution.  

As the first photosynthetic organisms that ever existed, cyanobacteria are responsible for allowing higher life forms to evolve on this planet. The Aztecs called them tecuitlatl and used them as an important part of their diet until the fall of Tenochtitlan, in the 16th century. Cyanobacteria are also known as “blue-green algae”, which form mats on the water surface that can produce harmful toxins to humans and aquatic life. We commonly know them as spirulina, which is now produced on a global scale and advertised as a fashionable superfood. Since it’s easy to grow and harvest, spirulina is an important element in a space crew’s diet. Actually, it is projected to become a nutritious source of food for the first colonizers of Mars.  

The project author, artist and scientist Aga Pokrywka, in collaboration with the Super Eclectic studio, developed an interactive vessel – a bioreactor – that monitors the growing cyanobacteria’s condition. It is programmed to combine this information with data from NASA’s yearly budgets, global gold mining and the subsequent production of carbon dioxide. The Cyano Automaton communicates by tweeting various information that shed a light on how these statistics are related to exploitation and colonialism; whether here on Earth, or in outer space.

“Through its life cycles, the cyanobacteria inhabiting the Cyano Automaton give us compelling insights on how these huge numbers are interrelated. They also help us realize that the damage caused by human activities, at a systemic level, cannot be just resolved with personal actions (…) There must be a systemic change.”

– Agnieszka Pokrywka (2021)

The Cyano Automaton website displays, in an intrepid style and with scientific accuracy, graphs and numbers of the reactor’s temperature, turbidity, and air pump. It also provides visualizations of statistics on NASA’s space exploration budgets; annual gold mining in terms of tons and profit, as well as the production of CO2 linked to these activities. A live stream of the reactor, sleek blueprints of its design, and an extensive description of the project are also part of the digital platform. The website is linked to Cyano Automaton’s official Twitter account.

Mining has a strong relationship to colonialism. Colonizers saw the territories they occupied as places they could use without any consideration for long-term consequences, exploiting local populations and natural resources. In many cases, it continues until nowadays. Gold, the symbol of wealth and status, has probably been one of the most sought-after minerals ever. Colonial gold enriched European powers and funded the slave trade. Gold is scarce and that makes it valuable, and extracting it damages the environment by producing excessive carbon dioxide. Its overexploitation, here on Earth, has raised speculations to look for it on other planets.

“Gold means economic value, and each year, a percentage of the gold mined worldwide is spent on space exploration. Sending rockets to outer space may give hopes for an interplanetary future, for some, but it’s damaging our planet now, for all.”

– Agnieszka Pokrywka (2021)

Inspired by the complicated history of microscopic cyanobacteria beings, the Cyano Automaton seeks to find connections between different scales of colonization: bacterial, terrestrial, and interplanetary. Together with cyanobacteria as protagonists and narrators of this story, the project knits a critical narrative about ongoing eco-social exploitation and conquest. In the end, whether it be on Mars or here on Earth, the mechanisms of colonization are strikingly similar.

“There is no way to explain our current ecological catastrophe without looking at past and present colonization practices.”

– Agnieszka Pokrywka (2021)

The Cyano Automaton project was publicly showcased at the Uroboros 2021 festival during the CreaTures Feral track as a co-creative workshop. Participants made their own experimental spirulina-based space food, following an experimental recipe and listening to stories of colonisation. Each step of the recipe performed together with the participants became the background for a critical discussion on terrestrial and interplanetary colonisation, of which cyanobacteria – as the first photosynthetic organisms on the planet – have been key players. Interaction with the Cyano Automaton remains available in the long term, via its website and Twitter profile.

In January 2022, Agnieszka Pokrywka and Cyano Automaton embarked on a mission and art residency at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah desert, US. From September to October 2022, the Cyano Automaton vessel was presented at the Helsinki Design Week 2022 – Designs for Cooler Planet exhibition in Espoo, Finland as part of the CreaTures project showcase.

The Cyano Automaton project’s documentation and its concept were compiled together in the form of a video.