Digital Nature
Channel: British Library
Date: 2021-06-02

During the 2020 lockdown, the British Library commissioned Faint Signals, an online artwork created by interactive arts studio Invisible Flock from recordings in the Library’s environmental and wildlife sounds archive. This project forms the jumping-off point for a discussion on the intersection of nature and the digital, in a time when the importance of both online connectivity and access to open space has been brought into sharp focus.

Chaired by Irini Papadimitriou, Creative Director at Future Everything, the event features Ben Eaton from Invisible Flock, academic and author of books on nature and technology Sue Thomas, and Cheryl Tipp, Curator of Wildlife and Environmental Sounds at the British Library.

Part of the British Library’s springtime season on environment: The Natural Word.

Irini Papadimitriou is a curator and currently Creative Director at FutureEverything. She was previously Digital Programmes Manager at the V&A and Head of New Media Arts Development at Watermans. Her display Artificially Intelligent was exhibited at the V&A in 2018. She has been a co-curator for Arts & Culture at Mozilla Festival and is co-founder of Maker Assembly. She is an Imperial War Museum Institute Associate, an Industry Advisory Group member for SODA (School of Digital Arts) at Manchester Metropolitan University, and an Advisory Board member for ONX Studio.

Invisible Flock are an award-winning interactive arts studio based at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park operating at the intersection of art and technology. They create highly sensory installations and environments asking us to renegotiate our emotional relationship to the natural world. Their aim is to open up critically important ways of thinking about how we live, how we connect and share to live better together in a global society.

Cheryl Tipp is the British Library’s Curator of Wildlife & Environmental Sounds. With a background in zoology and library services, Cheryl has spent the past 15 years looking after the Library’s world-renowned collection of over 250,000 species and habitat recordings. She has worked extensively on projects that encourage the creative reuse of archival content, from student videogames and short films from emerging filmmakers to interactive storytelling and musical compositions.

Dr Sue Thomas is a writer and Visiting Fellow at Bournemouth University. From 2005-2013 she was Professor of New Media at De Montfort University. Her books include Nature and Wellbeing in the Digital Age (2017), Technobiophilia: Nature and Cyberspace (2013), Hello World: Travels in Virtuality (2004), and Correspondence (1992), short-listed for the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel. She is currently writing a new novel, The Fault in Reality.