The Listening Wood / The Living Stone

The Living Stone and the Listening Wood are a pair of locative digital installations conceived and designed by artist Leah Lovett which Internet of Things technologies to deepen people’s experience of place.

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The Listening Wood is a site-specific installation and digital poetic walk around fourteen of Hampstead Heath’s ancient and veteran trees. Visitors to Golders Hill Park are able to interact with the work via either sms or thelisteningwood.com to generate a poetic record of their encounter with the trees, recalling the Romantic tradition of the Heath.

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A digital poetry installation across three of the former homes of Dorothy and William Wordsworth, The Living Stone reflects on the different ways in which language shapes experiences of the Lake District. Visitors to Dove Cottage, Allan Bank and Rydal Mount can search for bird names engraved on slates and message by SMS to receive poems relating to each site. The poems combine material from the Wordsworths’ notebooks with the words of fell runners, notices to airmen, weather forecasts, and the hum of social media to investigate the connections between writing and place.

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Role

Co-Investigator

Collaborators

• Dr Martin de Jode (Research Fellow)
• Dr Leah Lovett (Research Fellow)
• Professor Andy Hudson-Smith (Principal Investigator)

Outputs

• thelisteningwood.com
• ‘A Walk in the Woods’ in Walking’s New Movements (with Leah Lovett, Martin De Jode, and Andy Hudson-Smith). Charmouth: Triarchy Press.
• ‘Mobile Communications in Tree Time’, in Leonardo (with Leah Lovett, Martin De Jode, and Andy Hudson-Smith).