“IT FELT LIKE TREADING IN AN UNSEEN FRONTIER SPACE.”

What is lost and what is gained when we turn nature into data?

The Dataset’s Dream emerged through a collaborative art-science project at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (UKCEH) in 2022. Poet Thomas Sharp and Bryony Ella spent the summer with a multidisciplinary team of scientists at UKCEH who have been developing a web tool to help people identify locations in Britain most in need of new biological records. Their aim is to improve species distribution models for conservation planners and policy makers through the DECIDE tool, which highlights areas of Britain where butterflies and moths are under-recorded. To do this, they have been working with a dataset that contains over 18 million sightings of butterflies and moths made by over 100,000 volunteer recorders over the past 22 years.

The creative response to their work was to explore the world of big data and biological recording through the lens of the dataset itself. Pondering our relationship to nature in a highly digitised world, The Dataset’s Dream is a story that considers what is lost and what is gained when we turn nature into data. How is our relationship to nature shaped by the act of looking at it through the lens of a camera and translating encounters into hard facts and figures? What are the longterm and real-world impacts of absences and gaps in the collected data - the moths and butterflies that are unrecorded and overlooked? And how do we reconcile the desire to advocate for the protection of native species through data with the ‘enticing futility of collecting and preserving forever the names of everything.’ (Thomas Sharp)

The resulting installation seeds poetic narrative and illuminated glass cocoon-caskets throughout landscapes that are ‘off the beaten track’, inviting audiences on a self-guided journey into the world of big data. Exploring the importance of both cataloging the natural world and of touching it with our imaginations, the installation is surreal and meditative, full of sorrow and of hope.