‘Beginning today we’ll rebuild the world from all of the good little feelings everyone is having’ (or The dataset’s dream) is a commission from the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, and an artistic collaboration with Bryony Benge-Abbott.

We had an open brief to create a response to UKCEH’s DECIDE project, a dataset of UK butterflies and moths spotted by volunteer recorders. Our piece imagines the dataset’s first dream.

In the first iteration of the work visitors explored a winter-dark Twickenham wood in the dusk, encountering glowing nodes of consciousness / Victorian hot houses / strange caskets, whilst listening to an eighteen-minute spoken word piece written by me.

Here are some of the good feelings the visitors had “it felt like treading in an unseen frontier space” / “ethereal and meditative” / “the sense of wonder and vulnerability it conjured!” / “it has reaffirmed my belief that simply recording nature is not enough – we must feel it, be with it, if we are to restore the balance between humans and the rest of the natural world with which we share the planet” / “a beautifully complex and deeply thoughtful way to help us reimagine our understanding of environmental data” / “I was thrilled by the poem, how powerful it was to animate a database and make it so likeable - and the wider message was vital and useful” / “a new and thought-provoking perspective.” / “a very magical experience.”

You can listen to the audio below. Brought to life by the brilliant Tricia Brioux.

It is about imagination, absence, loss, animism, John Clare, art, science and how we touch the natural world with our consciousness.

Installation photography by Ewelina Ruminska.