the park speaks

Above is an image of Pukekura Park taken from The Park Speaks video that is 2048px wide. The video is a four minute loop of a 360 degree pan of the park from Poets Bridge. The loop is projected in the gallery alongside a second lopo, of photographs of trees subjected to increasing symmetries.

The above set of photos shows the actual sensors in their installed location in the park. To the left is the temperature sesnsor, on the back of a park sign. In the middle is one end of the people counter, which uses a beam which is broken when people walk by. The sensor on the right measures UV.

The nodes (or sensors) in the park are shown above. We also collect battery voltage levels and signal strength data. The data can be graphed from the above page.

Above is a screen grab of part of the the project back end, which as you can see is excellently simple. The sensor data from the park is uploaded automatically to the server and another page uses Javascript to do Ajax call backs to the server. This access and structure was built by Adrian Soundy.

 

The Park Speaks involves interconnecting the natural world of a botanic garden with the human world of language. In my broader worldview I see humans, plants, animals, mathematics, the earth, and the universe as one interconnected whole. For some time now I have been interested in enabling interconnections between diversities.

In The Park Speaks the connections are facilitated electronically by the use of data sensors in the environment and internet enabled audio translation of data. The audio plays in an exhibition space, where a triple projection plays. Two of the data projectors play a video loop two desktops wide of the botanical garden. The third data projector displays a series of images of trees with varying amounts of rotational symmetry applied to them.

The project became a kind of reflection on what it would be that a park might say given the opportunity. As the phrases were developed, increasing levels of poetry were input to the project. Ultimately the selection of phrases that are played is determined by the associated live data reading. This means the natural world has an impact on the heard phrases.

A project such as this can only be achieved with collaborators who were Andrew Hornblow, Julian Priest and Adrian Soundy for the technical aspects. The video production team included Mark Dwyer, Aafke Visser and Peter Wareing. The project was hosted by Puke Ariki, and thanks are due to them and their staff, particularly Duncan Carter and Gerard Beckinsale. Jock McQueenie was involved in the conception of the project. .