 Good evening. I'm Ken Taylor, cultural producer now for the British Library and I'd like to welcome you tonight to event digital nature. It's part of our wider natural world season of events which reflect on the urgent need to reimagine our relationship with the environment. And it's also part of our growing cultural program from the Leeds region, where we have one of the British Library's two sites. I'll hand you over shortly to our event chair, but first just some brief housekeeping notes. We'll have an audience question and answer segment towards the end of the event. So we do encourage you to send any questions you have for the panelists in throughout using the question function. You'll see below this window on your screen. And we'll do our best to answer them at the end. We also encourage you to tell us what you thought of the event afterwards using the feedback link that you'll find above this window. I'll now hand you over to Irini Papadimitri, our event chair. Irini is a curator and is currently creative director of Future Everything, having previously been digital programs manager at the V&A and head of new media arts development at Watermans. Irini. Thank you Ken. It's a great pleasure to be here. And I'm looking forward to our conversation today and good evening to everyone in our audience. So before saying more about our theme for this evening's conversation, I would like to introduce our brilliant panelists. So I'm very pleased to welcome Ben Eaton from Invisible Flock and a world-winning interactive art studio based at the beautiful Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Invisible Flock work across art and technology and create 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. I'm also pleased to have here tonight Dr. Sue Thomas, writer and visiting fellow at Burmos University. And Sue was professor of new media at the Montfort University between 2005 and 2013. And here books include Nature and Well-Being in the Digital Age, Technobiophilia, Nature and Cyberspace, Hello World, Travels in Virtuality and Correspondence, which was a short list of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel. And Sue is currently writing a new novel called The Fault in Reality which sounds fascinating. Welcome Sue and welcome Ben. And last but definitely not least, we have Serial Teep, who is the British Library's curator of wildlife and environmental sounds. What an exciting job title. And Serial has a background in zoology and library services and has spent the past 15 years looking after the library's amazing collection of over 250,000 species and habitat recordings. And Serial has worked extensively on projects that encourage the creative reviews of archival content from student video games and short films to emerging filmmakers to interactive storytelling and musical compositions. So welcome to all of you. And to go back to our theme and what we're talking about tonight. I'm very interested about the title of our conversation on digital nature. And also I can't think of a better time to talk about these two different elements, but also very much intersecting worlds, digital and nature, and especially now going through the steel going through a pandemic. We're spending so much time online in order to connect digitally but also it's a time when we are probably realizing more than ever how important nature is for our well-being. So there's loads of stuff to talk about tonight, but also going back to these two worlds I'm often thinking whether going through this crisis, the past kind of over a year actually, but also going through and the environmental changes and climate crisis. Now is a time that we might be rethinking our relationship to nature, but also thinking where technology fits into that. And some of these ideas are being explored in a new online artwork by invisible flock called faint signals, which was commissioned by the British Library last year during lockdown. And faint signals has been created using recordings from the Library's Environmental and Wildlife Sounds Archive. So before we start, we can watch a short film of faint signals. Thank you. Faint signals is an artwork entirely drawn from the British Library's extensive nature recording archives. It's a procedurally generated forest that's different for every user that loads it with over 3 million variations. We wanted to create a meditative experience that really required people to slow down and spend time listening in this imagined woodland. The world itself is is nondescript in terms of timelines. It exists somewhere between before humankind and potentially after us. Great. So, Ben, if I may, I would like first to come to you since we've just watched a trailer from faint signals, which is, I had had the chance to experience it some time ago and it's such a beautiful and contemplative piece. And especially, I think it takes a different, it has a different significance right now, especially when, you know, during the pandemic, we have no access to culture, we have no access to nature, like I don't, I live quite far away. And I would like to hear like from you, maybe the importance of these work also for you as an artist and as a studio at Invisible Vlog, but also in terms of happening now, but also the experience of making it happen during the pandemic. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that was very exciting for us as a studio who have been making work primarily focused on or in and around the environment and our relationship with the natural world for like the past maybe five years, was actually making a piece of work that was about nature that is right on our doorstep. And so a lot of our work has sort of tried to tackle perhaps some seemingly bigger, I don't mean bigger in terms of importance or maybe just in terms of perception themes around conservation and then around land use and environmental degradation. But through our conversations with Ken and with Cheryl, we were really able here to kind of make a piece of work that was much, much closer to home. But like you say no less global and no less wide reaching really in what it's trying to explore and what it's trying to talk about. So we've been making work about nature, primarily I think driven by our own personal interests, both as as individual artists in the studio, but also as a direct response to what's happening around us. So being able to then spend time during the pandemic where we had been making these pieces of work that were much more global, they were based out of Indonesia and were designed for audiences and physical installations, you know, they're supposed to bring people together to share in these moments. And obviously, that's been impossible. And so instead to kind of do a complete pivot almost to make this thing that's primarily designed for one person to experience at a time very slowly, which doesn't necessarily have a shape other than the four seasons of the year that you kind of go through as you as you participate in it. It felt felt like a real privilege because one of the things we were able to do was to let Cheryl's archive material and the work that she she works to catalog into, and to digitize into preserve and to really let that lead the experience and so by using the sound of nature to drive it and working that way out, we were able to to I think make something that was, I think far more emotive or far more surprisingly moving that we actually necessarily expected to, which, which is great. It's always really exciting when something that you make surprises you. I guess it's also something that I found really interesting is that trying experiences like these, it makes you realize how, you know, especially now in at the time like these. It makes you take a step back and to realize that there is a whole world that we often don't ignore and don't think about and it isn't at our doorstep as you say and but also it's it's something that has had a bit of a devastating kind of feeling to me because it is about loss, it's about realizing that a lot of this world is slightly is slowly getting away from us and and I would love to hear also from Cheryl and Sue here in terms of like maybe to to share their their thoughts and experience of the piece as well. And maybe if it'd be great to hear a little bit about how, you know, thinking about archives, for example, and recordings, especially in the in such a vast collection like the British Library, and what it means for having pieces that from live. I mean, yeah, organisms from like extinct species that we can't bring back anymore but this is the only way that we can experience them. I can jump in. Yeah, for sure. I mean for me it was so great to work on this. A lot of the recordings that we were able to provide for the project. I'm very familiar with the recordists and their work. Luckily, we have been very busy digitized in a lot of our material, you know, we've got thousands and thousands of recordings. A lot of them were, they've been on tape for years and luckily through a project funded by the Lottery Fund, the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage Project. We've been busy for the past four years, digitizing recordings. So when I got involved with this, and I knew it was going to be British recordings looking at an imaginary woodland where the British Woodland. I thought this is perfect because we've just digitized all of these recordings, you know, we've preserved them, but also it really helps us share the recordings as well. So I think if we hadn't have done the digitization work, it would have been really tricky. You know, I wouldn't have been able to provide what 300, 400 recordings that we were able to or Ben was able to put into the piece. And so, you know, being able to that to do that was fantastic. And I think it's made the piece so much richer as well. And we go from, I think the earliest recording was made in 1935, recorded on a wax disc, you know, with a mobile recording van driven out into the countryside. And the most recent recording was made in 2016. So we've got a very broad range of material as well. So you never know what you're going to encounter. You're going to hear the hiss and crack of a very early recording, or you're going to hear something more contemporary. You never know what you're going to get. And that's one, well, that's one of the such great things about faint signals, one of many great things. I think just quickly to what are the things that we try to do when looking at the vastness of the collective material was tried to create kind of like a procedural system so that every time you logged in, you wouldn't necessarily have the same experience. Again, so anytime you log in to play or to experience however you want to describe interacting with faint signals, you could get one of I think it's something like 300 million different permutations, because we're creating, we created these vast data sets using the sound recordings as our starting point. So like if a sound file was recorded in a pine forest, we retroengineered all of the things that we imagine, all of the biomes that we imagine would be in place to allow for that sound recording to happen. They will get put into a system, which then generates itself randomly every time. So you always have different types of archetypal forest with different types of soil with different types of trees which then informs the different types of animal recording we might pull in. And so we've kind of got all these things rubbing up against each other, which does create this really beautiful unpredictability to it. And, and there was just one really quick thing about the digitization, which was kind of a mistake, but actually became one of our favorite things was we had all the files and at the beginning of every file. The sound record is all the archive is slates it. So they say out loud. This is so and so and this is what I'm recording and, and sometimes this is really beautiful I come and which record is it is Cheryl who talks at length to describe the environment around him and it's really, really lovely. And initially I was like well how on earth am I going to, you know, get trim 300 files you know like can we do it algorithmically can we just guess. And so we just put the files in unedited to begin with and actually it was this really beautiful thing where shedding the desire to like simulate nature, and instead going this is about playing back these sound files in a way that invites you in and completely different way meant that we left the slating. And it brings us really beautiful human connection I think and the fact that like these are people who stood in a forest recording these sounds. And that became one of our favorite things it was just a mistake that that's just stuck and you know I remember Cheryl you pointed out in the first place and my God yeah it's actually really beautiful. It works so well you know it really gives the sense of you know the sounds have come from an archive they've come from nature originally, but they have they've come from the archive and it's really nice to hear the voices of the recordist you know because they're usually silent in their recordings. They don't want to be part of it so you, you know you wouldn't know they were there and that's what's nice as well we have the metadata in the piece as well so you get to see their names. You know and normally you wouldn't you wouldn't you wouldn't have that kind of information so to be able to get that little human element is wonderful. That sounds great actually and yeah it's I love this process that you're talking about as well and I mean I'm not sure how if these would be something that comes differently like yeah it's experienced by audiences in the piece as well but it's something that I find really interesting in terms of experiencing nature online as well and so I would love to hear from you as well as someone who has written so much about both the digital and nature and to hear your thoughts about experiencing faint signals as well. Well, it was really interesting for me to have listened to it two or three times to faint signals because it fits in with a lot of the research that I've done. I was usually carried out in the 80s around that time by environmental psychologists who were really just looking at how nature affects people, how it affects their well being and their physical and emotional well being and so on. And interestingly they didn't usually go out into nature to do this testing, they often would just show their subjects a film or perhaps a sound recording I haven't come across that but I'm sure they did. Or even a painting would be enough to get results from individuals to actually measure their slowing heart rate or lower blood pressure and so on, so they could actually prove that well being was happening that this was having good effects on people health wise. But then we were in a period where there was quite a lot of friction between people who were interested in real nature of red in tooth and color getting out there and being muddy and actually interacting with nature. And the other side if you like the computer literate internet digital side who the two would have nothing to do with they would be too very different and opposing cultures and what I've been interested in looking at is actually how they come together. And how you do experience nature through the digital, whether it's audio or video or virtual reality and seeing how what kind of effects that has on you. What was interesting for me listening to faint signals was that one of the states that was kind of developed during this environmental psychology research was the notion of what they called nearby nature. And nearby nature can be the tiniest suggestion of nature. It could be, you know, you live in a city you've got hardly any greenery around you but out on the street there's a half dead tree with a few leaves on it. And that is that would count as nearby nature, and that will connect in with that ancient biophilic brain and produce a modicum of well being and feeling better, even from the suggestion of a forest through a small tree that's not very well. And hearing the birdsong like that seemed to me a similar thing a similar aspect of nearby nature, where you're only getting suggestions and they're all building up together to provide an entire experience. And I'm sure that if you did test it by watching people's heart rate and blood pressure and so on when they experienced faint signals it would be quite interesting to see how that worked and whether you got any useful results from it. So I think there's been a huge shift from the early days of environmental psychology who were very, if you like kind of anti tech to where we are now particularly after COVID, when suddenly people are realizing that actually you can experience nature through technology and have just as authentic experience in terms of the way that it affects you, as if you were, you know, out in real forest, obviously it's not the same. I'm not saying it is the same, but a lot of the benefits can be actually almost equally powerful. And virtual reality I can talk about that later, if you like, has been shown to be even more powerful than for example watching a Richard Attenborough documentary on TV. So there's a lot of research into that area and I think this project fits really well into that kind of mode of thought. That's fascinating. It's definitely talking from personal experience during the pandemic and the lockdown. I have definitely found myself to reach out for online content that is more related to nature, like sounds, nature sounds, or even these kind of like citizen science apps, online apps or websites where you can just spend hours just, you know, observing nature and, yeah, where not many things happen at times, but it's great to have this space to get almost a raise the space between yourself and the screen and get lost in there. And I wonder if there is any, or if we will know later on of research or like stats about like how if this has been like a general kind of case. But I just, I wanted to go back to what's something that struck me from faint signals and there was this idea of loss as well. And I was wondering if experiences like these can make us, or if they can work as some sort of like a wake up calls as well to think about, what we are losing slowly and it was really interesting also during the pandemic and the lockdowns that people like we had to slow down and we saw everywhere all of these photos but also videos of animals taking over as well the world and where we had been kind of, you know, just taking a step back. So it'd be really interesting to think a little bit about that in terms of what role art can play but also in terms of cultural institutions and collections like the British Library in terms of like how can they help us engage with where we are at the moment and this kind of crisis, the environmental crisis that we've been going through. I don't know who wants to go first but it's a person for all of you. I suppose I can speak to face signals maybe and I'll practice more generally or thoughts around it. I think it's a really fascinating one because I think there's always this fear or this concern about aestheticizing environmental collapse. And I think, you know, we have already not, we as a kind of a society or certainly kind of, you know, mainstream internet driven Western society, Western's a lazy town but you know what I mean, I'm beginning to develop aesthetics for it, you know, and I think, you know, you find aesthetics that are the beautiful classical music of an Attenborough documentary over the sad picture of a whale or Ludivico and now the playing piano on a mountain iceberg or, you know, and these are all very beautiful images and I think they're important images and culture I think has an incredibly crucial role to play in how we approach the next decades and, you know, and it is major cultural images and major cultural moments or cultural touchstones that do spark change and that do make people have, give people a shared language of which to talk about both ways to a future but also just with dealing with and coping with loss because I think there is something inherently tragic. I mean, you know, you listen to it's the old thing isn't it like all the all the animals in your favorite childhood movies are all dead now. And, and you know, there's something in that in, in a lot of the, you know, the 1920 sound recording that Cheryl talked about is beautiful. And then you know you think about how every single living thing apart from the trees that was recorded in that recording is no longer alive. And I think that's that impermanence is is is is being amplified constantly and I think for us with with making work in this sort of general area it's really important that we're not just pointing at things. Like I think there's enough, like it's too late for that just too late just to go climate change and pointed it as and I think we now as artists or as as makers as anybody really as scientists engineers as cooks as whatever it is that you do. As just the person, you know your actions and your choices should be actively participating I think in considering sustainable futures. So a way that we try and do that is we try and make work in collaboration with either scientists or researchers or archives is the case of the British Library to try and make sure that the aesthetic experiences that we're creating are grounded and are connecting themselves to reality. You know, I don't think faint signals has a cause to arms necessarily above and beyond, making you feel emotionally close to ecosystems and to species and to creatures who a lot of people have not been able to be close to because of the pandemic but also because we, we are increasingly divorced from nature in that way. And, and so I think it's definitely trying to do that. I suppose the last point of reflection is that with hand in hand with my worry about a steticizing climate collapse is also that we're therefore steticizing it through the lenses of a sort of, you know, global north culture, whereas, you know, the people who are experiencing the brunt of it live in the global south and you know they're, and so the those cultural moments that we create or that cultural language that will have any people climate collapse needs to actually incorporate all of those voices and all of those aesthetics and languages. And so, so yeah. Yeah, really you, you were going to say something or. Yeah, I was just going to say that using sound for highlight issues around or threatened species or you know potential loss is not a new thing. This example comes back to the 1970s with the very famous probably the most famous and most popular wildlife commercial record songs of the humpback whale, which was contains recordings that were made by scientists, Roger Payne. So that whales were able to sing, you know, they're very complex social system. And at the time, humpback whales and many whales were on the verge of extinction, you know, industrial hunting had just driven them to the brink, and he used those recordings to highlight or to raise awareness about the species and their social systems and how we should not be persecuting and capital records picked up those recordings. And you know they would normally put out pop stars you know they wouldn't why would they put out whale song, but they did and it was millions of copies were sold and that was really pivotal pivotal in the south save the whale movement, you know so just a few recordings he made with a hydrophone, you know in the ocean was saved humpback whales from extinction so there's a lot of power in sound recordings and that's a lovely example because they're recordings that were made for science, which then crossed that divide and went into culture popular culture, and then spread out, you know so it wasn't just confined to scientific research it went much further than that and that's what we like. Well that's what we do have a lot of our recordings in the archive as well you know they may come in from a scientist, but then they may go out and be used by an artist or a musician or a teacher or, you know, there's so much potential there. And what's interesting about your whale song story, and also about birdsong in general, is that it's kind of raw, it's real isn't it, and Ben was talking about aestheticizing global climate change. But I think it's inevitable that we will do that because ever since nature came to TV when I was growing up in the 50s. Nature has been more and more aestheticized and storified. And this is why I do have quite a problem with a lot of the nature programs that were also addicted to these days. It's not real. Most of it is not real. And that information is coming out more and more leaking out about the way that the blue planet was made etc etc, all the setup scenes, all the cutting. Storified. And that's what we've got used to. And so that's always in the back of my head when we say how much we enjoy watching nature on TV, because most of the time, it's been cut and edited and rearranged and faked in some way to give us the story of nature that we like. And now that same thing is happening when we think about climate change. It's all in stories, which is partly why I've got really interested in webcam nature, because that is real. And I believe there are certain kind of artifice aspects to that as well. But it's a million miles away from a beautifully curated TV series. So I think with the kind of a set asizing aspect is something that people need to wake up to and be honest with themselves. Are they prepared to watch real nature or listen to real nature sounds rather than something that's been beautified for them for their consumption. That's really interesting. So I was thinking exactly the same earlier all these, these webcams that I also mentioned earlier in terms of these windows to nature and they are not and there is this curated content that is missing and you, I think we were saying before that you sit there for hours and it just happens. It's so far away from what we're used to watch on TV programs. And I wonder if the way that we might be using internet to kind of experience nature might be changing how we interact with or how, yeah, or our perception in terms of like nature as well and this kind of beautified or like curated version of nature. I think it is because I always think of the story of the the eagle and the kitten and the webcam, which was which happened a few years ago and was widely reported in the United States, where as you've probably seen lots of these animal webcams have been carefully set up so that we can watch around the world 24 seven and then people talk in the chat rooms about what they're seeing and so on and they all become very connected. So in particular case it was an eagle's nest and the audience if you like had been watching this eagle nest for weeks they'd seen the chicks burst out of their shells they'd seen the parents coming back and forth and feeding the chicks and it was really cute and everybody loved it until the day that one of the eagles brought back a white kitten. And they were not happy with that. And I remember seeing one woman said I don't tune in to see this, but you should. And then then you got into the thing of messaging the Rangers and saying you've got to go up there you've got to rescue the kitten etc etc. But that's when you have to realize that this is reality and you wouldn't you wouldn't see that unless it was storified on TV. But it's a big leap to make and people might not want to make it. I think what you're talking about it also brings me back to one thing that I remind always myself about technology as well in terms of you know just using technology or using artificial intelligence or different kind of you know emerging technologies to kind of create a less realistic version of things as well and also it's something that seems we're talking about these two things digital and nature. I can't help but think about you know how what we were saying at the very beginning how much it borrows from each other and how much technology borrows from nature as well and I think so you have done quite a lot of work on that as well. But it's it's really one thing that we can't also forget about is that how the, you know how physical the online space is how physical, you know, what happens in between our screens like from from here I stand to where you all of you stand as well this very kind of material world as well right that we forget we often forget about. But before we continue I just wanted also to very quickly remind our audiences to please send their questions in and we will be taking questions in a few minutes. Yeah, but to go to go back to that shared language and between these two spaces like the technology digital world cyberspace but also nature, natural space. I would love to share your everybody's thoughts on that as well like why are we drawn to this to nature metaphors when it comes to to technology and we name things and the way that we name things. Do you want me to jump in on that since that's my. Well, I started off doing a lot of research into that into why we use nature metaphors, like, you know, web stream cloud, etc, etc. There's lots and lots of them to talk about a space which is completely abstract. And that was where my research for my book Technobiophilia started. And it seemed I decided that it seemed to me that if you're going into a completely abstract space as they were in the in the early 90s, you have to kind of find things that feel like something that you know. And I think that's why early cyber explorers if you like, coined all of these different nature based names there's lots and lots of them and. And we kind of got used to that. But today I think it's a bit different and in fact there was an article just in the Guardian I think it was today about research that's been done that shows that people now think of their mobile phones as home. And very interesting research talking about how you've actually got everything that you that you value at home is in your phone. All the people you care about. You know the things that you want to know about the information in your world, all of that is in your phone so you're carrying your home around in your phone, which was another interesting way to think about place they didn't mention nature in that respect. But I thought it was quite an interesting leaping off point for this kind of conversation. So, I think it's because we humans like recognizable things, and they will name and conceptualize them in terms of something they already know. And then that kind of led on from there to people using it unconsciously on screensavers and so on. Because they liked them not realizing that intuitively they were choosing nature metaphors and nature images for their digital world. I won't go on model. I'll be here forever. Yeah, let's maybe Sarah and Ben to share their thoughts here if you if you have anything to if you want to say or anything on this. I mean, yeah, I mean I anything I've always sort of assumed I mean pretty much kind of what Sue is saying in a way but like the idea that we find almost like markers for ourselves and like somehow using natural forms of things gives us a sense of the place of these of these weird worlds that we're still working on how to inhabit and how to be in and they kind of anchors them in some way, perhaps, or you know it just kind of gives us this sense that this is an organic continuum you know it's kind of it's still part of everything else and what we're doing is natural even though if it is, is, is, you know, an artifice that we're creating for ourselves. So is it you know because also not to go too far into this because it's a bit of an endless, you know, black hole but also you know there's a degree to which technology is in a way based on nature and it's you know in its in its materiality and and and its use has an effect on nature and so actually you know it is part of a a continuum of rocks in the ground turning into a laptop in front of you turning into God knows what in the future when they eventually break down so so so you know, at that point are we ever devoid of nature we still perform and use technology within the context of nature. So, so yeah that you can't necessarily separate them maybe I don't think but but but it's interesting that that's who talks about that idea that they used that you know there was an early stages suddenly dichotomy, you know the kind of virtual reality, that kind of style thing you know you were in a different world entirely, which is very interesting, you know I think increasingly we're realizing there is no other. There is no other world that we can inhabit entirely. And I think it's been quite destructive in some ways that early dichotomy because, you know, we're not so long ago we were all thinking about having to choose between our phones or going for a walk, you shouldn't take your phone on a walk. It's not bad. You know you need to experience pure nature, whatever that is, but I think that the pandemic has taught us otherwise I think a lot of people have changed their minds about that that difference and what I'm interested in really is people living an integrated life with their technology and the natural world. And I think the pandemic has taken us a long way towards that. It's been a lifesaver for so many people technology, you know being able to experience nature whether it's through webcams or sound recordings or virtual tours or whatever. Without that I think many people would have would have really struggled you know because you can't go anywhere but at least you can use your laptop or your phone or even if it's just photographs. One thing is because we're so used to using it anyway you know use it for our, speak to our families we use it for work we use it for all of these different things, then be using it to experience nature and to you know gain enjoyment or to calm ourselves or to distract ourselves. It's just second it's becoming second nature doesn't mean that it's replacing you know the wonder that you get when you go into a woodland you hear a dorm chorus or you see the, you know you hear the sound of the sea in real life. It's, it's, as long as you don't just totally rely on that you know you do recognize that nothing quite but it's going out into nature, but having that as a backup when you need it. It's been conscious and aware of the world around you, the digital world and the natural world. I'm trying to experiment at the moment actually I can't show you from where I'm sitting but I'm growing lettuces behind my laptop. I've set up my desk so that there's a box of lettuces at the back and I can watch them grow and I could eat them if I want. And it's just it's a silly little thing but it's being conscious and thinking well how can I bring more nature into my digital life. I can have a plant on the desk I could grow lettuces, I could have plants behind me for zoom calls. Yeah, it's being aware which your piece is making people aware. No, I was just thinking while you were talking like all of you, you were saying you're you were sharing your thoughts about like a project called low tech magazine. I don't know if you have come across it but it's not it's not new it's been around for a while but it's it's basically a solar powered website and it's really interesting because it has when when you it means that. Sometimes it might not work because because the weather hasn't allowed for it to work and it's really interesting it's an interesting way to have this to have this connection because it gives you real time data about the weather but also forecasting in terms of whether whether you will be able to access it or not access the information. So I thought it was a really interesting way. Yeah fascinating project to kind of think about, you know, natural phenomenon or whether in through like technology. But yeah, but we have also, I'm going to bring in very quick, very soon, some of the questions because we have quite a few interesting questions that, and we did, we did answer some of them but a couple of people have been asking about also the experience of smells as well and of different nature environments and if we can remember and whether we could remember at smells like looking at pictures or or being online so I don't know I don't know if you have any. Any suggestions or like if you can point to any studies or maybe artworks that that use kind of smells in that way I haven't I haven't so I'm not sure if any of you have. There's an artist who made a perfume of the smell of Petricor, which is you know the smell after rain has just fallen and they kind of recreated that in a perfume, which is quite beautiful and very specific I think. I have a terrible sense of smell. So, I'm making up the best person to ask. Well I can't remember the artist's name either I'm sorry but yeah yeah but it's called Petricor within the purpose called Petricor. Yeah, which is a beautiful word as well. And it's interesting also that sometimes even you can you can bring to your mind smells from sounds or from being in a place I don't know it happened it happens to me I don't know if it is something unusual but but I have experienced it a few times so yeah. It's really something I think you know my earlier, my personal, I think smell is so powerful as a personal emotion I think it's very interesting that I mean perfumers would disagree, and probably cooks and chefs but like it's something that's quite hard to to wield in a way isn't it or I always think of it as quite hard to wield, you know to be like I'm going to recreate the smell of. That's why I was that experience or or it feels it feels like it'd be something quite. Hard to wrangle to kind of reproduce that that emotional connection you have to it. The funny thing is actually, you can reproduce it quite easily in writing. You know, I used to teach a lot of creative writing classes, and it was an easy one as a prompt for writing is just to get people to think about a smell or better still present them with a smell or a piece of fruit or whatever. And all these memories will come up. It's amazing and then you know you write it down in fact it's easier to to evoke smell through words probably than the other art forms. That's a gross generalization but yeah. The connection between smell or language is really interesting though because I'm always fascinated how with wine, for example, if you smell it. You often there's something in there and it's not until somebody tells you what that smell is that your brain or at least my brain makes the connection between language and olfactory senses. It's almost like my brain didn't have the necessary information to go. That's the thing that you know and that's a smell and this is how they connect and I always find that really interesting that its language is the missing piece. Yeah, for you to go oh that's a raspberry or whatever you know and I always find that really fascinating. Yeah. I just, I wanted to bring in another question sorry I don't know if. Sarah you wanted to to jump on this. So Paul steer from our audience was saying that it's interesting that we think of ourselves divorced from nature when we are off nature. We are made of the same stuff do you all think that other in nature is at the root of our problems and I think we did touch on some of these issues before some of these ideas but it'd be great to go back to that and share your thoughts. We always talk about ourselves like us and then nature you know there's always this separation but you know clearly we're not separate and you know we're all living on this one planet and we're all relying on each other and so you know we have to be so careful what we're doing because of the impact that we're having certainly because we're not it's not us and them, you know, it's it's it's it's all of us all the species on the planet we've all got our place and we all have to, you know, coexist and work together in a you know in a way to ensure our survival. And it shouldn't really, we shouldn't be thinking about it like like that I think more and more the people are becoming aware of that issue is, you know, us and then the humans and then everything else. And we're pulling it back hopefully. I would hope so. There's a writer called I think Roderick Nash who wrote a book about the American wilderness, where he addressed the the role of the human if you like in the natural world. And at the end of it he makes a really good suggestion which I think is worth considering, which is that he suggests that the whole of the planet Earth should have certain reservations where the humans lived, and then the rest of it is just left. That's where, you know, animals can and plants can do whatever, but to confine the humans to reduce their impact on the rest of the planet. I mean, obviously it's not possible but personally I don't think humans can ever really take their place in in the rest of the world because such interventionists, they would always be somehow moving away from everything else. I'm quite pessimistic about that really. Do you think I'm wrong Ben? I don't think you're wrong necessarily at all. I think it's so I mean it's such a dense topic isn't it, because I think, you know, I think we are definitely we have definitely othered ourselves from nature. But I think the way in which we have done that varies so radically all around the world as well and, you know, by driven by different forces of markets of revolution of capitalism of colonialism and all of that and I think, you know, and so I think the way that otherness takes shape is so different. But and I think, yeah, I mean, I would tend to agree, certainly that I wonder whether we need to find a way to understand ourselves is not other was accepting that we cannot be part, we also are probably beyond the points where we can return to this sort of like primal copier perhaps you know and actually it's about how do we in the numbers that we are with the needs that we have a society's find ways to preserve what we still have I suppose, you know, and so I think, is it half earth the book or is that a different book because there's a book called half earth as well I think where he suggests, where the author suggests that half the earth be given over as a natural reserve and the other half, but that was quite recent that was only like a couple of years. You know, this is this is 10 or 20 years old. Right. Yeah, I know so so so yeah but again that idea of going okay so this is the line and you know no further. But then I suppose the one thing that is really fascinating about that is that we've been doing quite a lot of work with various kind of indigenous groups and by which we would define people who who work or who are heavily dependent on the land. And, you know, in place like the Amazon, for example, it's very fascinating because actually, you know, it has never really been completely human free you know they were sitting there were there were tribes, you know, cities the size of New York you know historically and and maybe not quite that big but big. And so there's this notion that actually nature was all fine and getting along and then the humans arrived at you know humans have always been there to a degree and I think the idea that that it's, you know, you can just leave it is also slightly is slightly complicated as well and and it has some practical logistical stuff you know like that there was a there's a in Indonesia, there was some rainforests that have been cut down some people are working with there. We're explaining that they can't just let it be grown its own because the funds grow faster than the trees. And so if they just let the forest grow, then they'll just have funds and they won't have trees so they have to do this management because obviously they're having to manage land that is previously been destroyed by logging in human activity so you know it's like you're actively trying to heal something or at least try and restore it a bit but that idea that we can maybe just step away. I don't know. I don't know. It's so vast and so complex. The other ring, the other ring of ourselves at spiritual level and emotional level I think is definitely the problem I think you know whether we could ever non materially other ourselves I don't know but I think emotion and spiritually the other ring is so I think you know the roots of so much is wrong about how we treat nature but also how we treat each other you know because that extractive way of thinking carries through to how we treat other humans. Sorry that was long. No absolutely and that's what I was thinking about Ben as well in terms of what you touched on like early on in the conversation in terms of the work that you do in like beyond the west and how we you know think often differently about nature as well to people who are in the other side of the world or like you know non-western cultures as well so which is something that I think it's quite big to go into this conversation but it's really interesting to kind of bring this about these different perspectives as well. But that takes me to another question by Marcus which says asking if people might be curating a small world for for the for themselves by choosing which digitally mediated people to relate to or experiences to consume. And he's kind of bringing as an example the person absorbed absorbed in their phone, while indifferent to kind of to what happens around them. So, so he says like for all that the digital world gives people choice is there also scope for digitally created surprises that people might not necessarily choose. That's faint signals though isn't it really. Thank you Cheryl. Because you don't know what you're going to expect so you know we don't you don't want to expect you just go into it and you could you could use it three times a day wouldn't have the same experience you could do it every day you wouldn't have the same experience so that's, that's the beauty of faint signals you've cracked it then. Thank you Cheryl. I think as well and I'm sure Sue maybe we'll have more to say. I think we often conflate like digital as well with what are actually consumer experiences being pushed in us so people say digital to mean Facebook. They're really different things like digital is actually such a blank slate of opportunity and of creativity and has been historically, you know and I think that's what we try and do as practitioners in that space. So digital really you know in your in your curation work Irene as well you know you really showcase that you know digital is not just these walled gardens that we have been corralled into live our lives like Google and Facebook and Instagram and all of that it is actually a you know it's a series of protocols and languages that make machines do things. And within that lies incredible power and magic and potential. Yeah, I totally agree with that and for me this is where I always go back to Hawaii, you know cultural institutions but also artists and art plays such an important role in terms of helping us. Yeah, see a different world actually and it's the same with digital because many people might think of as you were saying bent of digital experiences in a very specific way but there's so much more to that as well. Yeah, and I think this is where I find like fascinating the work that obviously artists do but also the the role that institutes art institutions but also yeah places like the British library but also I'm thinking of, you know examples like the the one museum for example like where they the they have this project coral and it's such a place that you wouldn't, you know, thinking about creating innovative coral reproductive research for example to develop the techniques to stimulate coral reproduction so it's things like that that you wouldn't expect to find in in in a in a cultural institution or even like thinking about they came in Karlsruhe with their critical zones, ambitious exhibition and all these conversations about climate change as well so so it's great that we have these experiences out there to to help us in a different world. Speaking of coral, don't they use sound to heal coral haven't they found that if you play the sounds of healthy coral on a unhealthy coral reef it helps. Yes, yes it does yeah you play the sounds of a healthy coral with all the sounds of the fish and the invertebrates, and that attracts nearby species, and then they come and they find a new coral and think I quite like it here I might stay and so they are yeah no you're right they do. I think just go back to the mobile phone thing. I think we have to be careful here. I mean, one thing is it's very interesting to know why we love our phones so much. I would really like to know that, and I think it will be discovered I mean it's a very specific thing when you see people. It's kind of annoying we all know it even though when we're doing it ourselves it's annoying, you know, but people are like that with books, people are like that listening to music. People are like that looking at nature and being transported somewhere else. And I just think we just need to, you know, get get this in context. I mean 100 150 years ago in the Victorian era, the idea of novels. They were thinking corrupted people's minds and you know they shouldn't be allowed and so on. And it was only about 1414 10015 100 when people, most people could read and write probably later than that. So before that time, most people were illiterate and the way that they experienced and communicated the world was completely different to how it was in 1700 or 1800 things change, and we change with them. And so I think you're going down a dead end rabbit hole to think about the kind of the bad things that mobiles do to our brains because they also do some very interesting things too. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, coming from also a museum world and having worked for years at the V&A it was something that we were saying all the time in terms of suddenly we could see young people interacting with the collections in a completely different way, for example, and seeing things that, you know, we couldn't find or like we couldn't see through their eyes. So it was it's really, I totally agree with you. I mean, we, yeah, we always learn and find new things and new ways to to interact with with devices and it's great to look at these, you know, in genuine ways in how people use their devices or like anything basically any tools. Yeah. So we are, I'm not sure if we have maybe, yeah, we have one more question but it's something that we have said maybe already but I just wanted to bring it up maybe as a closing point. So Jean was asking if digital nature is more for people between to get a balance between nature and cyberspace or if it's and enjoying nature online or if it's more as if we can think of it as a way to inspire and awake people to go back to real nature. I think we've already spoken about this but maybe maybe you can bring some closing notes because we are aware of time as well. So I don't know who wants if anyone wants to, yeah, say anything on that. Well I could say very quickly that there's no such thing as going back to real nature, because there's no such thing as real nature. So integration. So all of those things as well, isn't it? I mean it depends on how you want to interact, well it depends on how you want to use technology. Some people, if you want to create things, you know, using sound recordings, like in my collection, or maybe you just want to have a more passive role, I mean it is very individual, I would have thought, you know, how you, what path you follow through that world. Then do you have any closing notes on that? Any closing statements? No, I mean I'm not sure I do. I think I agree with both Sue and Shale very much. I think that the idea of dichotomies is perhaps the wrong way to approach it because I think it is, A, it's a losing battle but I don't think it's a useful way to look at it. I think, you know, we have tremendous opportunity for enrichment and for greater proximity and participation and perception of the world around us and I think we should embrace that, we should become more literate with how we use our technology, a lot less. Thank you all so much. Sue, Sarah and Ben, thank you very much for your brilliant insights and thoughts tonight. And I would like also to say a big thank you to the British Library for having us here tonight and of course our great audience and their very interesting questions. And have a great evening everyone. Thank you very much for joining.