The Dataset's Dream

Deep in the heart of St Nicks nature reserve in Yorkshire, the UK’s butterfly and moth database is dreaming. Enter the dream.

Seeded throughout the nature reserve, The Dataset’s Dream is an unguided installation created by Artist Bryony Benge-Abbott and Poet Thomas Sharp, featuring a series of illuminated glass ‘casket-cocoons’. Visitors are invited to venture into the woods at sunset to encounter the illuminated, colourful caskets whilst listening to the spoken word audio through headsets.

Poetic narrative and illuminated glass sculptures guide us on a journey into the world of big data, exploring the importance of both cataloging the natural world and of touching it with our imaginations.

What happens when we turn nature into data? If data could talk, what would it say to us in this time of declining populations of our beautiful butterflies and moths? If it could dream, what worlds and visions would it conjure?

Created in collaboration with researchers at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, this curious, sorrow-full, hope-full, data-full installation by artist Bryony Benge-Abbott and poet Thomas Sharp, is a dusk-time storytelling experience where nature, art and data combine in one inspirational experience.

Important event information:

This is a FREE event but booking is required. Tickets are available on eventbrite.

The experience lasts approximately 18 minutes.

We have a limited number of headsets available so audiences are requested to bring a personal mobile phone and headphones to access the audio experience.

The installation will be spread across the St Nicks Nature Reserve and recommended for audiences over 12 years old. Torches will be provided and volunteers will be on hand to assist. More information and sign in will be at the entry gate to St Nicks Environment Centre.

Delicious hot drinks will be available to purchase from St Nicks.

The Dataset’s Dream takes place alongside York Festival of Ideas 2 - 15 June and Big Tent Festival Ideas - 17 June.

About the project:

The UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology is an independent not-for-profit research institute, with a long history of investigating, monitoring and modelling environmental change. UKCEH scientists provide the data and insights that researchers, governments and businesses need to create a productive, resilient and healthy environment.

Bryony Benge-Abbott is an interdisciplinary artist exploring our relationship to nature at the intersection of science and spirituality. Bringing different cosmologies together through painting, public art and wild drawing walks, her work focuses on expanding our sense of community and belonging in light of the ecological and climate crisis. Unravelling dominant Western narratives of nature as ‘other’, Benge-Abbott invites audiences to contemplate one’s own place in the more-than-human world with awe, humility and reciprocity. Over the past 15 years Bryony has collaborated on a wide variety of creative projects with activists and academics alike, at institutions ranging from The Women’s Library and the Black Cultural Archives to the British Ecological Society and The Francis Crick Institute. www.bryonybengeabbott.com

Thomas Sharp invents worlds, campaigns and artistic moments with language at their heart. He’s spent his life thinking about what writing can do. Amongst other patrons, he has been commissioned by the British Library, Historic Royal Palaces, English National Ballet and Henry Moore Foundation. He grew up in an English West Midlands village. After he left they dug up an old field and discovered Europe’s largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon treasure. He accepts this as a metaphor. His poetic and artistic world is informed by Chaos Magick, the Romantics and DADA. His work is about language, consciousness and the divine. https://www.thepoetryofitall.com/