AWEN

AWEN: A Walk With Nature by The New Real and Edinburgh Science Festival

AWEN is a self-guided walk developing a deeply personal encounter with the environment beyond human scale. Interactive art, sound, movement and play are prompted by global climate data and science. AWEN was presented during the Edinburgh Science Festival 2021 and the COP26 United Nations Climate Change Conference 2021.

You can join the AWEN experience by visiting awen.earth. You will be able to start your walk from anywhere in the world. As you move through your surroundings, you will receive poetic and playful prompts to your smartphone. 

AWEN is a call to action that aims to help people find a voice on the environment. It is not a destination but a few steps on the journey to a different relationship with our surroundings and each other. This is an intimate experience with big ambitions: to connect people to the big picture, to far away events, to a global outlook, and to local action.

We asked...

How can interactive art make explicit the local meaning and relevance of global climate information, and explore the link between global-scale data and “ground truth”?

The challenge

AWEN’s overall objective is to bridge the gap between global datasets and models about the environment and climate and the local, everyday perspective. We cannot really deny knowing the bottom line of the scientific evidence about climate change, and what we should do to stop it. But it is sometimes hard to act when the problem is so much bigger than the human scale and when the danger is not immediately apparent in our everyday lives. It's vital we create a different relationship to the environment, and for this we need new stories, new experiences.

Science & technology

We use mobile digital technology and satellite data to personalise each walk by tracking user’s GPS location and tailoring the prompts and directions they receive. We hope to use even more advanced machine learning algorithms in the future to localise the experience even more.

A key piece of science we worked with are the carbon cycles on earth, in air and in oceans. Oceans in particular have a massive role to play in carbon cycles – sometimes referred to as “blue carbon” – and we need to look after them better, something that is not widely appreciated.

The audience experience

This is a free pilot experience. The AWEN web app is a prototype and we invite our audiences to leave feedback so we can evolve it – and fix any bugs and glitches. AWEN is also a research project, finding out how the design of digital festival experiences can equip cultural organisations to reach new, bigger audiences while at the same time supporting climate action and local understanding of global climate data. It explores the ways data systems and artificial intelligence reflect and shape our social reality. The Edinburgh Science Festival is a living laboratory enabling the prototyping of new ideas for tomorrow’s world. We want feedback from people of all ages engaging with the experience to inform AWEN’s future development. 

Creative Process

AWEN has been developed by a close collaboration of art, science, design and engineering. We used a collaborative open prototyping process to structure detailed discussions to make sure we got the application’s look, feel, content and functions to work together in harmony. In this project, we set out to create an experience that is both playful and scientifically accurate.

Collaboration

This is an outcome of the Resilience in the New Real project, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Experience in the New Real project, supported by the Scottish Funding Council Covid-19 Recovery funding to the University of Edinburgh’s Data-Driven Innovation initiative. AWEN was developed by The New Real in partnership with the Edinburgh Science Festival.

Initiated by Drew Hemment, Chancellor’s Fellow and Reader at The Edinburgh Futures Institute. Developed in collaboration with Edinburgh Science Festival. It has been developed as a research collaboration with the Edinburgh Science Festival by a team of artists, scientists, designers, and AI specialists. They comprise Inés Cámara Leret; Sam Healy and Brendan McCarthy from Ray Interactive; Tom deMajo, Malath Abbas and Susie Buchan from Biome Collective; Amanda Tyndall and Jennifer Rodger-Casebow from Edinburgh Science; Martin Zeilinger from Abertay University; Matjaz Vidmar, Evan Morgan, Aditya Kamireddypalli, Julie Ann Fooshee, William Mackaness, Sophie Mackaness, Kaite Welsh and Janet Archer from The University of Edinburgh.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Inés Cámara Leret explores life through that which is unseen, portrayed as static or seemingly ephemeral. She is inspired by the transformative nature of materials, naturally occurring phenomenon, the methodologies used to understand these and the entanglements that arise as such. This way of thinking is facilitated by bridging expanded networks of experts, within and outside academia, and a highly experimental making process. Spanning across mediums previous works include recreating weather conditions of the same day but of past and future years, exposing the term ‘light’ and its definition to the equivalent time elapsed since light was measured, growing a perfectly ordered crystal from saliva and capturing rainfall using asphalt. 

Brendan McCarthy is a creative technologist, working in the realm of visual communication, motion graphics and UX design. He’s the founder and co-director of Ray Interactive, designing and producing bespoke interactive experiences and data-led art projects. He is also the co-founder and co-director of Lava Town, a shared working environment in Edinburgh set up for creative-tech practitioners. Despite being very much into technology, film and gaming he does enjoy the great outdoors; camping, cycling and hiking. He loves a cool crisp beer in the sun, makes a bangin' Irish stew, and firmly believes that the best lists come in threes.

Sam Healy is a creative coder specialising in custom interactivity and generative art. He is technical director at Ray Interactive, an Edinburgh-based digital studio with an international client list.

Tom deMajo is a UK based digital artist and game designer, Tom deMajo focuses on multi-sensory interactive experiences, bridging the gap between contemporary arts and games. deMajo has gained a reputation for convincing work that explores relationships and effects between technology and society, often using unconventional spaces to create dynamic immersive experiences. A founding partner of Biome Collective, a Scotland-based co-working space to support and encourage cross disciplinary creation, collaboration and exploration in digital art, games and emerging technologies.