The Machine in the Garden is Listening (Finn Arne Jørgensen)

• Tuesday, January 26^th / 2–4 pm / C40.530 

• This event is in English.
• This event is in-person with a hybrid option. Contact us to receive the Teams Meeting link.

• Registration is not necessary. 

More than a decade ago, I described the digital environmental humanities as a form of armchair travel. I examined how databases, digitized archives, and immersive media connected environments distant in space or time, whether the Arctic, the deep past, or lost landscapes, to people elsewhere. In that essay, I focused on a nature that was elsewhere, brought to us by and through media, in ways that fundamentally shaped our experience. Since then, my research interests have taken me in new directions, yet I keep returning to the question of how technology mediates the experience of nature. I have become much more interested in the embodied experience of nature, in being in place, and in the sensory and emotional texture of environmental encounters. Such encounters are always already mediated. As scholars and as humans, we can use technology to deepen our encounters with nature. 

In this talk, I will explore one of my experiments, which I will bring with me to Lüneburg. I have been teaching a Raspberry Pi to listen to birds, using an open-source neural network called BirdNET. It listens continuously and logs every species it believes it hears, building a record of my garden’s soundscape even while I sleep or when I’m away from home. This machine in the garden produces a time series of the place where I live, anchoring my experience in recorded data and connecting it to data from elsewhere. Drawing on discussions in environmental humanities, sensory studies, critical making, and digital humanities, I will ask how technologically assisted sensing and data collection can lead to deeper human and communal connections to nature rooted in specific places. 

Finn Arne Jørgensenis Professor of Environmental History at University of Stavanger and co-director of the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities. His research investigates how technology shapes and enables relationships between people and their environments, drawing on history, media studies, and Science and Technology Studies. He has published two monographs on environment and infrastructure: Making a Green Machine (2011) and Recycling (2019) and five edited volumes. He has been a project leader for several interdisciplinary international cooperative projects: EnviroCitizen Horizon 2020 project (2020-2023), the Locative Technologies and the Human Sense of Place NFR FRIPRO project (2019-2023), and the Asia-Norway Environmental Storytelling (ANEST) INTPART network (2020-2024).

An event organised in collaboration with the Centre for Digital Culture and the research area Climate Futures in Digital Cultures

cdcforum@leuphana.de