In an era of accelerating ecological degradation, how might experimental art practices help audiences foster deeper, more empathetic engagement with the intelligence of living systems? This paper explores the potential of contemporary art, when aligned with ecological science, to reframe forest regeneration as a site of aesthetic and ethical inquiry — by regarding the forest as a primary composer within artistic and ecological frameworks. It asks: how might this approach underpin a novel form of ‘Critical Forest Pedagogy’ capable of deepening our understanding of the collective natural intelligence of the living world and encouraging long-term conservation?

To test these ideas, a new art-science project, Forest Art Intelligence, was initiated, framing a regenerating forest as an evolving, living artwork. Because forests evolve through stages mediated by life, death, regeneration, and human influence, those stages of growth can also be framed as ‘process art’ – a practice that values each stage of an artwork’s transformation. Collectively therefore this approach proposes a form of art-led ‘Critical Forest Pedagogy’ suited to engaging communities traditionally unaligned with conservation, while remaining relevant to ecologically cognate audiences. It further asks whether this framing might promote a rethinking of restrictive, human-centred definitions of intelligence that underpin generative AI.

The tropics have been first to suffer from the effects of unsustainable practices on land and sea. The Carbon_Dating project (2019 to 2025)—an artwork and cultural campaign designed to provoke a re-imagining of human-grass futures that builds relationships with native grasses—has worked in Far North Queensland, Australia, with two First Nations participants: Mbabaram Elder, knowledge-holder, and ethnobotanist Gerry Turpin, and Kuku Yalanji Master Weaver and artist Delissa Walker Ngadijina. Using traditional knowledge and creative works to forge new imaginaries that selectively choose or refuse those of the coloniser, the contributions of these two participants are an assertion of Indigenous relationalities in the tropics, and offer others a way of re-imagining plant-human futures in the wider world.

Armstrong, K., & Leimbach, T. (2020). Aerial Pitfalls: Harnessing the power of the “good” drone. In Leonardo: Abstracts from the Spectra 2018 Symposium: Systems (pp. 1-5). MIT Press.

Art-eco-science practitioner Keith Armstrong is committed to a hybrid practice. He collaborates in the field with ecological scientists recording biodiversity, species loss and extinction and creates works that play
a role in redesigning social relations to natural systems. Currently working closely with aerial robots (aka drones or UAVs), Armstrong wants to understand how ‘we’ might better use drones, away from societal preoccupations with surveillance, privacy, AI and remote warfare, and our apparent drive to create bleak ‘new natures’. In this conversation, Armstrong and sustainability scholar Tania Leimbach explore the potential of arts- science collaborations to radically transform attitudes, perceptions and modes of participation.

In recent years I have begun to integrate creative robotics into my ecosophical art practice, which I have long deployed to investigate, materialise and engage the thorny, ecological questions of the Anthropocene. I have been seeking to understand how this form of practice may promote the cultural conditions required to assure, rather than to degrade, our collective futures.
First published in Fibreculture Journal, FCJ-203, Issue 28, Creative Robotics: Rethinking Human Machine Configurations, 2016.

In 2010 the 'Remnant Emergency Artlab' set out to alleviate this utopian hangover through a creative provocation called the 'Botanical Gardens ‘X-Tension’ - an imagined city-wide, distributed, network of 'ecological gardens' - in order to ask, what now needs to be better understood, connected and therefore ultimately conserved?

Proposes a form of art practice that is focused around the understanding that our ecological crisis is also a cultural crisis that is driven by our sense of being separate from the ecologies upon which we depend. Presented at DAC 2007.

Considers the issues and implications of applying an ecosophical, practice-led methodology during the Intimate Transactions project and its relevance as a guiding method for other creative practitioners similarly interested in eco-social and eco-political engagement. Published in FibreCulture Journal.

Examined whether ecosophically orientated art works could assist participants making connections between the ‘problem of ecology’ and the a problem of how we image ourselves within the world. Presented at Pixelraiders 2, Sheffield, England.

Early investigations in and through new media practice where I had begun to develop new approaches to artistic practice built upon concepts drawn from the disciplines of scientific and cultural ecology. Presented at DAC 2003.