The Future Ecology Initiative

DPrime Research is an ensemble of artist-academics specializing in cultural production informed by the intersection of technology, research and the arts. Starting in 2013, we will begin work on The Future Ecology Initiative: a long-term conceptual and speculative inquiry into possible ecologies of the future. Our first large-scale project in this endeavor is Heterogenous Ecologies. An extension of our explorations into the complexity of natural systems, this project will be an exploration, documentation, and recontextualization of the Cascadia Bioregion, an area of enormous ecological complexity that stretches across borders in the Pacific Northwest. The objective of the project will be to co-locate, describe and connect ecological "others" within the region — creating an intermingling across space and time that seeks to challenge the very definition of ecology. Employing a diverse set of technologies and methodologies — including ecological data collection, environmental sensing, field recordings, software agents and custom-built unmanned autonomous vehicles (i.e., "drones") — we will execute expeditions across Cascadia in order to construct a large-scale ecological portrait of the region that explores its environmental, historical and cultural complexity. In the tradition of environmental artists such as the Harrison's, James Turrell and Mel Chin, the Heterogeneous Ecologies project and The Future Ecology Initiative more broadly, will represent our attempt to "take stock" and assess our ecological present, as well as make speculations into our ecological future.

Target: Cascadia Bioregion

The Cascadia Bioregion has numerous places that are of ecological, historical and cultural significance. In order to locate and describe the ecological "others" among these significant places, the research will be undertaken in 4 phases:

Phase 1: Using customized eco-droning techniques, DPrime will execute expeditions to collect various kinds ecological and environmental data.

Phase 2: Then, using pattern matching algorithms, heuristic orthomosaic mapping techniques and subjective inferencing of data attributes, DPrime artist-researchers will locate the constitutive otherness between two distinct ecosystems.

Phase 3: After determining correlations between ecosystems, the next phase of the project will consist of identifying paths within those ecosystems that exhibit similar or otherwise related subjective and statistical characteristics (e.g. tree concentrations, sonic characteristics, emotional valence). Virtual software agents will then be deployed to run expeditions using features of the DPrime eco-data repository™ to generate tracklogs and ecological models. These will then be used to metaphorically "bridge paths", virtually connecting the two ecosystems.

Phase 4: using GPS, augmented reality and mobile applications, these bridged paths will then mapped out so to construct a new virtual ecology, integrating ecologically, culturally and historically diverse areas of the Cascadia Bioregion.

The tangible outcomes of the Heterogeneous Ecologies project will serve as a record of both the process and products of our artistic inquiry. Exhibitions will document the process of the project through the display of the various developmental artifacts that are produced as we collectively deal with the inevitable technical and aesthetic contingencies that are often encountered in an effort of this magnitude. For example, we will present the iterative plans (e.g., sketches, prototypes) that will result from the construction of our drones and their component sensors, as well as the various drone prototypes.

The products of our project that we plan to display include the raw data collected by our drones (e.g., sound recordings, aerial videos and photography, soil and water samples), as well as explorations and syntheses of those data, in the form of 3D computer renderings and virtual software expeditions and visualizations. We will also present critical writings and reflections.

As an example, consider the following scenario. Hiking expeditions undertaken along the numerous general areas in Cascadia such as the Columbia River Basin in eastern Washington, the wetlands of the South Okanagan in southern British Columbia and old growth forests on Vancouver Island in southeastern British Columbia. Data collection will be undertaken via drones and custom mobile sensor kits. The data will include ecological and environmental data, sound and aerial video and photography. The aerial images, combined with the sound and sensor data from all the regions explored will be examined using the methods described above. The matching pairs of "others" that were obtained, the virtual software expeditions, tracklogs and ecological models and renderings of the new virtual ecologies will then be displayed as a gallery installation.

As a supplement to the exhibition itself, we also propose a series of workshops exploring the technologies used in the project (e.g., the affordable construction of drones for citizen science), as well as lectures and panel discussions examining changing conceptions of our natural ecology as we move from an ontology focusing on representation and mechanistic rationality to one that embraces complexity, diversity and ambiguity. This new ontology has implications beyond a meta-geography (e.g., the interminglings and redefinitions of the Cascadia bioregion--as in the Heterogeneous Ecologies project), and will inspire reflection on other human constructs that have thus far been dominated by rational boundaries and delimited categories.