Hedgework is an urban landscape intervention installed at the Brookyn Navy Yard in New York City that takes the form of a sentient hedgerow. It is a community of native plants and environmental sensors that create a biodiverse habitat that supports the bees, butterflies and birds that inhabit it, while engaging the workers, cyclists, pedestrians and other community members that surround it.
One of the oldest man-made landscape interventions, the first hedgerows were planted to enclose land for cereal crops in the Neolithic age, 4000-6000 years ago. Originally property boundaries, hedgerows have come to serve a variety of purposes: from preventing soil loss, reducing pollution, regulating water supply and reducing flooding, to providing shelter from wind for crops, farm animals and people. They are reservoirs of biodiversity, providing habitat for species beneficial to local biomes and supporting the production of biomass as a source of energy. Hedgerows have also served as sites of social gathering, political resistance and alternative education. The Irish Hedge school, for instance, emerged in response to the repressive Penal Laws of the 18th century. It was an educational practice that began as an oral tradition of teaching members of a local community gathered around rural hedgerows.
Hedgework learns about its environment. It samples local ambient air temperature, humidity, barometric air pressure, particulate matter and CO2 levels. It senses how warm and moist the soil is, and it watches buds bloom and birds feed. A networked microcomputer processes images from an embedded camera system to classify visiting species with a machine learning algorithm trained on a dataset of North American birds.
Hedgework wants to chat with you. It is a natural storyteller that engages the public at large through a chat interface driven by a large language model (LLM) fine-tuned with information on its native plants. It also draws on real-time data streams from its environmental sensors to playfully communicate about the state of its microbiome and the conditions at the Building 77 plaza. Hedgework also composes. It collaborates with local electro-acoustic composer and musician Robbie Lee to transform real-time environmental data into a live generative audio composition streaming 24/7. Hedgework’s live stream reflects its current environmental state and continuously transforms over the life of the installation based on changing environmental conditions and hyperlocal events.
CREDITS:
Hedgework was commissioned by the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation (BNYDC) and was on view from May – November, 2024 at Building 77, 141 Flushing Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11205.
Hedgework is a collaboration between Marek Walczak (Civic Space LLC), Mark Shepard (Center for Architecture and Situated Technologies (CAST)) and Antonina Simeti (Timbre Consultants) with contributions from Robbie Lee (sound composition), Wes Heiss (Civic Space LLC), Cindy Burkowski (landscape design), Timothy Noble (software/hardware development), Johanna Kindvall (graphic design) and Nayarit Tineo (installation support). Thanks to the volunteers who lent their time, energy and brawn to help bring this project to life, including: Lee Baratier, Bradley Cantor, John DeLorenzo, Jeremy Gibney, Amanda McDonald Crowley, Vivian Selbo and Charu Singh.
A previous iteration of the project was exhibited as part of was part of Agrikultura, an exhibition of public artworks, installations, meals, performances, urban interventions, and events that took place outdoors in Malmo, Sweden, in 2017.
PROJECT WEBSITE: https://www.hedgework.net/