Workshop Event – Monday 14th July

"It's snowing still", said Eeyore gloomily, "And freezing." "However, " he said, brightening up a little, "we haven't had an earthquake lately" - A.A. Milne

July’s session will take place on Monday 14th July. The session will focus on making the predictions for the machine in response to the data you collected in the forest and the scientific data being collected from the weather station. The session will be an informal look at how we can bring together science, predictions, fortune telling, poetry and folklore to make predictions about our future. The session will look creatively and collaboratively at how we can make these predictions and is not reliant on writing.

Rachel is preparing some resources to share with the group including poetry, films and images based on other people’s visions of the future, and how changes in weather and the seasons have been reflected upon by writers throughout history. If you have any examples that you would like to bring along from your favourite futuristic utopian or apocalyptic film, poetry about seasons or environmental change or everyday sayings, then we would love to have your input and hope that you can join us for the session.

Please do book your place again via eventbrite and please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions about the next session –
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-prediction-machine-3rd-workshop-tickets-11648754739

The workshop will be taking place in the same venue that the first session was held in back in May – LUA Project Space, Edward Barnsley Building, which is next to the college and also home to Cope Auditorium & the School of the Arts. Attached is a map and directions, or you can find us on the university online map – http://www.lboro.ac.uk/about/map/

 

 

Visions of the future…

Spring in Ploughman's Forest, Nottinghamshire

I am in the process of putting together images, poetry, prose and films that represent how we perceive the seasons, the weather and climate and imagine how these will change in the future.

I hope that this can provide a starting point for writing the predictions for the machine.

“The wind had dropped, and the snow, tired of rushing around in circles trying to catch itself up, now fluttered gently down until it found a place on which to rest, and sometimes the place was Pooh’s nose and sometimes it wasn’t and in a little while Piglet was wearing a white muffler round his neck and feeling more snowy behind the ears than he had ever felt before.” A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner

“The seasons’ difference, as the icy fang 
And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,
Which, when it bites and blows upon my body,
 Even till I shrink with cold, I smile.” Shakespeare, As You Like It
 

“In the spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;
Sweet lovers love the spring.” Shakespeare, As You Like It


If you would like to contribute some suggestions please tweet them to @hello_tree

Workshops

how do we respond to climate change? - go north, guilt, may have to adapt buildings in new weather conditions, connecting more with nature, becoming more observational, changes in behaviour mitigation and adaptation, relating to plants and growing patterns for the common connection, increasing unpredictability planning anything may become difficult, individual local/collective/national/political response

Two workshops have now taken place in Loughborough that is bringing together people from Loughborough to explore how we mark, record, understand and respond to climate change in our everyday lives.

The first session was an introduction to the project, I took along the life-sized cardboard version of the machine to show people what the artwork will look like when it is exhibited at Pilkington Library (on the University campus) and Loughborough Central Library. I also made fortune cookies again, with a plate for a different future scenario (increased consumerist society, a collective environmentally conscious society or continuing as we are). Each cookie (these were made with a Brazilian Empadinha recipe) had a ‘climate fortune’ inside that related to the future scenario.

After presenting and talking about the project and also introducing the research that my colleagues at the University of Nottingham are doing with me (into the impact of this work on our responses to and perceptions of climate change) I introduced the first activity which asked the group to discuss three questions and note down their responses onto paper discs (see some of the responses in the image/alt text above). The questions were:

1. How do we connect climate change and weather
2. How can we connect data and narrative
3. How do we mark and respond to these changes

The aim of this session was to start a very broad discussion about how we think and feel about the issues at the core of The Prediction Machine project.

the group standing in Holywell Park, a predominantly Ash Forest on Loughborough University's campus

The second session involved the group (with many new members) joining myself and Jon Millet, an ecologist based at Loughborough University, on a walk in the forest. Jon presented his research in the forest on Ash dieback, explaining how the forest will change in the future and how it has changed and evolved since  it was cut down in the second world war.  We then became ‘human sensors’ in the forest, enacting with our bodies how the weather stations that Jon is using to sense changes in the forest works (and how the weather station works that will control The Prediction Machine).  To do this we wrote down on a scale between 1-10 what we thought the temperature, humidity, sound, light and air quality was. It was a lovely walk on a sunny day in this fascinating ancient forest that has been destroyed and regrown, half through planting and half naturally. We could feel a difference in light and environment between these two halves and very much felt the ongoing impact of the winter storms, where the soil (particularly on the replanted side of the forest that has less light reaching the floor below the tree canopy) is wet with mud and without heavy boots was nearly impassable at times. Jon told us that the soil here hasn’t recovered from the huge amounts of rain so any additional rain has just saturated the soil.

The next session will start to look at how we interpret that moment in the forest (and for people who missed the session their will be an opportunity to do their own human sensing), looking at other artists, writers, film makers interpretations of the environment and how it will change in the future we will begin to compose our predictions for what standing in the forest will feel like in 2044…