MOBILE COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGIES
IN TREE TIME: THE LISTENING WOOD
Leah Lovett, Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis,
University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E
6BT, U.K. Email: l.lovett@ucl.ac.uk.
Duncan Hay, Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis,
University College London, Gower Street, London, WC1E
6BT, U.K.
Andy Hudson-Smith, Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial
Analysis, University College London, Gower Street, London,
WC1E 6BT, U.K.
Martin de Jode, Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial
Analysis, University College London, Gower Street, London,
WC1E 6BT, U.K.
See https://direct.mit.edu/leon/issue/54/2 for supplemental files associated
with this issue.
Submitted: 4 June 2019.
Abstract
This article presents a practice-led investigation by a cross-
disciplinary team of artists and computer scientists into the potential
for mobile and digital communications technologies to engage
visitors to London’s Hampstead Heath with the histories of its veteran
urban trees. Focusing on the application of Internet of Things (IoT)
technologies within the arboreal environment for the digital poetic
walk, The Listening Wood, it considers the reciprocal impact of “tree
time” on the development of “slow tech.”
A visitor to Golders Hill Park, London, in March–April 2019
may have noticed a series of words etched into roundels of
offcut wood and placed at the base of trees (Fig. 1): YIELD
under the pear; near to the fallen oaks, CARTWHEELS; and
ACCIDENTAL beneath a sweet chestnut’s severed limb. By
messaging these words to an SMS number displayed on
printed materials in the park or the geolocated web app at
thelisteningwood.com, the visitor would have received
fragments of poetry related to each of the trees, the park and
the wider Hampstead Heath: “Pruned petals: / words enjoyed /
in the poet’s / kitchen garden.”
These text-based interactions punctuated audience
experiences of The Listening Wood, a digital poetic walk
around fourteen of the “veteran” trees of Hampstead Heath
resulting from a collaboration between artists, technologists
and arborists from UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spatial
Analysis (CASA), and the City of London Corporation. The
signal aim of this research project, while indebted to the
walking practices of artists including Alec Finlay [1], was to
discover how pervasive mobile communications devices and
technologies associated with the Internet of Things (IoT) might
be utilized to engage visitors with the cultural and social
histories of London’s veteran trees and also to negotiate
different temporal registers in which human and arboreal lives
intersect. We hoped that using mobile and IoT technologies as
vehicles to convey poetry generated from corpora of
ethnographic and archival research might lead audiences to a
deeper appreciation of the trees and, indirectly, the work
undertaken by the arborists as their custodians. This article
discusses the way in which technologies associated with
instantaneity and distraction interacted with the slow passage
of “tree time,” via digital poetry, to produce more attentive and
sustainable encounters between humans, technology and trees.
Veteran trees are defined as ancient for their species, or as
having characteristics associated with ancientness, irrespective
Fig. 1. The Listening Wood, Hampstead Heath
(© Preamble, 2019. Photo: Leah Lovett.)
of their age [2]. Crown retrenchment, decay and exposed dead
wood betray the survival of the oldest of the project trees—a
450-year-old oak—through two “Great Storms” (1703, 1987)
and industrial urbanization. Hollowed, gnarled and fallen
veterans provide microhabitats to support the biodiversity of
urban parks like Hampstead Heath, but they also offer a point
of contact with the past, across sweeps of time spanning
human generations. Almost two centuries before its inclusion
in The Listening Wood project, the leaning pine of Sandy
Heath (Fig. 2) was sketched by the landscape painter John
Constable [3]; nearby, a pair of three-century-old oaks stand
precariously atop a mound of sand, undermined for railway
infrastructure projects by Victorian industrialists [4].
If veteran trees are evocative of the past, then IoT
technologies anticipate an increasingly connected future.
Broadly defined, the IoT describes the tendency through
which the decreasing cost of computing power allows more
and more objects to sense their immediate environments and
interact with one another. Using Object Oriented Ontology
approaches derived from philosophy, Lindley et al. interrogate
the distributed nature of IoT technologies and the challenge
this poses to the relationship between humans and “things”
(including living things) [5]. If connected devices can make
autonomous decisions and relay data back to corporate entities
whose purposes and business models may be entirely opaque,
then the centrality of the (human) “user” is called into
question.
Digital communications technologies have also served to
mediate and shape scientific knowledge of arboreal societies
in recent years, as the
coining of the term “wood
wide web” to describe the
mycorrhizal network of
hyphae through which
trees transmit information
about their environment
and share resources might
imply [6]. Research
instigated by ecologist
Simard in the 1990s has
contributed to an emergent
understanding of trees as
social and essentially
collaborative: Saplings
without access to the
canopy may receive vital
resources from “mother”
trees, which in turn
become established as
“nodes” in the network [7].
Fig. 2. The leaning pine, Sandy
Heath. (© Leah Lovett, 2019)
220 LEONARDO, Vol. 54, No. 2, pp. 220–221, 2021
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While this area of semantic overlap suggested the potential
for mobile and IoT technologies to imaginatively reconfigure
the relationship between humans and trees to the Listening
Wood team, the implementation of an interactive, technology-
based installation in Hampstead Heath presented a number of
challenges. As one arborist stated on an initial site visit, “you
can’t bolt anything onto the trees.” This limitation combined
with the open aspect of the site, leading to a risk of theft,
precluded the use of hardware such as the Bluetooth beacons
deployed by members of the team in previous projects
exploring digital technology, memories and stories [8]. Nor
would the use of such hardware necessarily guarantee
meaningful exchanges between human and arboreal actors.
Notwithstanding various artistic attempts to transpose
biofeedback from plant matter into audible sound, arboreal
channels of communication remain unintelligible to humans
[9]. How, then, could mobile and IoT technologies be used to
cue human audiences into the slow dramas of veteran trees?
What, if anything, might the trees make of such an encounter?
In fact, the temporalities of technology, trees and human
lifespans are so variant that they cannot be comfortably
reconciled. Artist Katie Paterson’s Future Library gestures
towards this incommensurability through the planting of trees
destined to become books after the deaths of their authors [10].
The Listening Wood alternatively draws on the affordances of
IoT—its immediacy, its ability to deliver site- and context-
specific messages, and the pseudo-randomness of software
algorithms—to convey peripatetic poetry which serves,
metaphorically, imaginatively and spatially, to bridge this gap.
The only material intervention into the site of The Listening
Wood consisted in the end-grain roundels of wood, which
were reclaimed from the Heath as part of its day-to-day
management. The etched words referred to a characteristic of
each veteran tree and functioned on another, technological
dimension within the project, as a mode of “tagging.” As tags,
they interacted with a natural language application (“chatbot”)
programmed to respond with lines of poetry generated from
corpora of archival texts and interviews related to the trees
and the Heath. Although there was no practical way to
manage equipment loans in this instance, the development of a
bespoke SMS Gateway for the project enabled anyone with a
mobile phone (smart or otherwise) to access the work via text
message (Fig. 3) using printed maps available throughout the
park. In addition, the geolocated HTML5 website
thelisteningwood.com offered a secondary interface to the
installation, with an interactive map to help audiences
navigate the site.
By walking around Golders Hill Park and the Heath and
interacting with The Listening Wood, visitors were able to
construct a poetic record of their encounter with the veteran
Fig. 3. The Listening Wood, screen shot.
(© Preamble, 2019)
trees that resonated beyond the instant of apprehension. The
durational effect of poetry combined with the distance
between the trees and the somatic experience of the walk to
engender a mode of “slow tech,” understood in terms of the
sustainable and conscious use of technology [11]. Audience
feedback gathered during the project launch event suggests
how, far from being a distraction, the technological interface
enabled a more attentive relationship with the environment to
unfold: “It felt as if I could use [SMS] to nudge the tree, or
wave at it . . . to have another level of depth to the encounter.”
Individual experiences of the project were further shaped by
the happenstance quality of the interaction. As one visitor put
it: “Knowing that there were more possible responses than I
received helped it all seem like an encounter with a world
bigger than me.”
The Listening Wood brought several networks of human and
nonhuman actors into play: humans living and working with
trees, trees acting on and through humans as propagation
vectors, humans interacting with digital technology, trees
interacting with each other. Ultimately, however, these
networks remain opaque to each other. We can no more speak
to trees than trees speak to us, and while humans are reliant on
pervasive mobile communications technologies, their
computational processes are similarly invisible to the user. Yet,
bringing these distinct systems into contact through digital
poetry produces a powerful set of metaphors for thinking about
each of their different temporalities. In response to tree time,
technology slows down, becomes less concerned with the
speed or volume of data transfer than with the aptness of the
message in time and space. Language then becomes less about
literal description and more about creating the conditions for
imagining what it might mean to hear trees speak.
Acknowledgment
This project was funded by the PETRAS IoT Hub. Special thanks to Lucy
Fraser, David Humphries and the City of London Corporation.
References and Notes
1. For example, Alec Finlay, on (and off) mountains (2014):
www.alecfinlayblog.blogspot.com/2014/07/on-and-off-mountains; Clare
Qualmann and Claire Hind, eds., Ways to Wander (Axminster, U.K.: Triarchy,
2015).
2. David Lonsdale, ed., Ancient and Other Veteran Trees (London: Ancient
Tree Forum, 2013) pp. 5–8.
3. See Ian Waites, Common Land in English Painting, 1700–1850
(Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell & Brewer, 2012) p. 142.
4. T.F.T. Baker, Diane K. Bolton and Patricia E. C. Croot. “Hampstead:
Hampstead Heath,” in C.R. Elrington, ed., A History of the County of
Middlesex: Volume 9, Hampstead, Paddington (London: Victoria County
History, 1989) pp. 75–81.
5. Joseph Lindley et al., “Why the Internet of Things Needs Object Oriented
Ontology,” The Design Journal 20 (2017):
www.doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2017.1352796.
6. Kevin J. Beiler et al., “Architecture of the Wood-Wide Web: Rhizopogon
Spp. Genets Link Multiple Douglas-fir Cohorts,” New Phytologist 185, No. 2
(2009): www.doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-8137.2009.03069.x.
7. Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees (London: HarperCollins, 2017).
8. Richard Milton et al., “Talking to GNOMEs: Exploring Privacy and Trust
around Internet of Things Devices in a Public Space,” Extended Abstracts of
the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montreal,
April 2018): www.dl.acm.org/10.1145/3170427.3188481.
9. See for instance Leslie Garcia, Pulsu(m) Plantae (2012–2013):
www.interspecifics.cc/work/pulsum-plantae-2012.
10. See Katie Paterson, Future Library (2014–2114): www.futurelibrary.no.
11. N. Patrignani and D. Whitehouse, Slow Tech and ICT: A Responsible,
Sustainable and Ethical Approach (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) p. 9.
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