A technological sensorium: Employing environmental sensors and creative data visualisation to engage public discourse on artificial light at night

Abstract

This paper investigates how unattended environmental sensors and creative data visualization can engage public discourse on artificial light at night, with a particular focus on the interrelation of human, non-human, and technological agents, actants, and processes. The study focuses on three projects, one in a rural site and two in urban sites: Sensing the Luminous Night: Innovations in Capturing and Communicating Observations of Light Pollution in an Area of Natural Beauty in Leighton Moss RSPB nature reserve in the northwest of England; Slough Digital Urban Forest in Slough in the southeast of England; and Re-wilding the Night: Co-designing New Engagements with Urban Darkness in Bonn Botanical Gardens, Germany. These projects designed and employed environmental light sensors and visualisations along with all-sky cameras to develop imaginaries of night-time environments as more-than-human ecologies. The sensors, designed with both a functional and aesthetic sensibility, capture variations in light and other environmental parameters throughout the day and night to highlight the complex interplay of natural and artificial light at night.

Working with public facing environmental organisations, the paper takes an experimental approach to public engagement that both foregrounds and critiques aesthetics and digital technologies. The concept of unwieldiness is introduced, emerging from the development and deployment of sensors, to explore the complex entwinement of human intent, technology, and the environment. A multivalent framework is proposed that integrates anthropo-, techno-, bio-, eco, and cosmocentric perspectives. Through aesthetic and time-based observations facilitated by sensors, the projects aim to imaginatively situate participants within nested spatial and temporal scales, creating attentiveness and attunement to more-than-human perspectives.

Introduction

Public-facing environmental organisations and initiatives, such as the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and the Slough Digital Urban Forest (SDUF) in the United Kingdom and the Bonn Botanical Gardens in Germany are dedicated to both environmental conservation and public engagement. This article examines how human–nature relations are negotiated through several related research projects situated in these sites. Each is concerned with how we experience and value the night. Focusing on the cycles and syncopations of natural and artificial environmental light and darkness, these projects employed creative design methods to develop environmental sensors, all-sky cameras, and creative data visualisations to observe and present the environment to contribute new cultural imaginaries of these naturalistic human-altered environments. Representations of both urban and rural landscapes, whether in media, art, advocacy, or policy, play an important role in how environments are experienced, perceived, and valued, and indeed which environments are valued (Matless, 1998; Rose, 2001; Schama, 1995). This has significant implications for environmental stewardship by both citizens and policy makers.

This article discusses several research projects that examine nighttime environments. Although each had specific aims, common to all was an exploration of how urban and human-altered landscapes can be made legible as ecologies of human, non-human, and technological actors, agents, and processes. Each considers how field-based environmental sensors and creative visualisations can be used to resituate everyday embodied experience within bio-, eco-, and cosmocentric imaginaries. Introducing the work to various public and professional groups revealed a range of social, cultural, and environmental concerns and motivations and demonstrated that, in addition to helping reimagine human–nature relations, these projects also did useful work in fostering both academic and public discourse on the value of darkness and light at night, both natural and artificial. Through a discussion of unwieldiness, the paper also considers how the development and deployment of sensors and infrastructure in the field itself reveals much about the environment in unanticipated ways.

The projects discussed are Sensing the Luminous Night: Innovations in Capturing and Communicating Observations of Light Pollution in an Area of Natural Beauty (STLN; 2021–22) in the Leighton Moss RSPB nature reserve in the northwest of England; SDUF (2019–2024) in Slough in the southeast of England; and Re-wilding the Night: Co-designing New Engagements with Urban Darkness (RWTN; 2022–24) in Bonn Botanical Gardens, Germany.

The paper first discusses context regarding the night and darkness, concentrating on both the perceived affordances and impacts of artificial light for humans and non-humans and the positive values attributed to darkness. It then goes on to describe the STLN, SDUF, and RWTN projects in more detail and how they came about. Examples of poetic, artistic, and scientific methods for becoming attentive to more-than-human perspectives follow, particularly through embodied practice and imagination; examples include the work of John Clare and experiments with more-than-human empathy. These are then compared with the sensor-based approaches taken by the STLN, SDUF, and RWTN projects. The aesthetic and functional aspects of sensor design, including sculptural forms and time-based visualisations, are described. This is followed by a discussion of how the methods developed facilitated public engagement and the social and cultural role that sensors and sensor-based observation can play in environmental discourse. Finally, the idea of unwieldiness is introduced, which emerged during the technical and creative development of sensors and supporting infrastructure and the deployment of these in these various landscapes. Unwieldiness is used to explore the complex interplay between human intent, technology, and the environment, while unwielding is suggested as a practice that situates the environment within a biotic, abiotic, and technological ecology.

The night and darkness

Artificial light at night is increasingly prevalent in urban and rural areas, significantly impacting both humans and non-humans. For humans, artificial light is often considered to enhance perceptions of security, safety, crime reduction (Green et al., 2015; Major, 2015). However, evidence does not support this; reducing urban lighting has been found to be correlated with no change or reductions in road traffic accidents and crime (Claudio, 2009; Green et al., 2015; Steinbach et al., 2015). Furthermore, many studies have shown that artificial light has deleterious effects on the health, well-being, and ecologies of humans and non-humans (Chepesiuk, 2009; Fonken and Nelson, 2014; Rich and Longcore, 2013). The adoption of efficient LED lighting has exacerbated the issue, resulting in increased light at night, most of which is broad-spectrum and more disruptive to organisms and ecosystems than the very narrow spectrum of sodium lights that were previously in common use (Gaston et al., 2012).

Urban lighting is also used to create identity, facilitate advertising, encourage tourism, and support the socioeconomic benefits of the 24-hour city (Chatterton and Hollands, 2003; Roberts and Eldridge, 2009; Shaw, 2018). Brightly lit urban nightscapes are associated with the technological sublime, drawing in imaginaries from films such as Blade Runner and the numerous filmic, televisual, and photographic representations of cities such as Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York, and Hong Kong as cities infused with light at night, while the areas that are left shadowed nurture danger (Barber, 2002; Fitzmaurice and Shiel, 2011; Nye, 1996; Stone, 2021; Zukin, 1996). Such phantasmagorical views of the night further mask the role that artificial light plays in diminishing the quality of the night and our capacity to experience it as a time and place in its own right (Melbin, 1978). Darkness is disappearing, and the value of darkness and the night is increasingly overlooked (Kyba et al., 2020). Nonetheless, critical voices continue to consider the importance of darkness and how and why it is valued and by whom (Bogard, 2014; Dunn, 2016; Dunn and Edensor, 2023; Dunnett, 2015; Edensor, 2017; Griffiths et al., 2023; Stone, 2018). Areas of inquiry, some already indicated, include the effects of artificial light on the health and wellbeing of human and non-human individuals and ecologies; the aesthetic experience of the night sky, such as the astronomical sublime discussed by Dunnett (2015); how we might approach urban design to be more attentive to the night and darkness (Dunn, 2020) through, for example, the development of responsive and nature-inclusive lighting; and the social and cultural imaginaries attached to the night and darkness. The projects discussed here are concerned with this complex entanglement of scales, from biologies, ecologies, technologies, and societies to planetary movement and cosmological processes.

Projects

The three interrelated research projects discussed explore night-time landscapes using creative sensing and visualisation methods. For SDUF, I developed unattended environmental sensors, capturing parameters such as air quality, temperature, humidity, pressure, soil temperature, lux, and phenology. I further developed and applied these methods in the STLN project to capture and communicate the presence of natural and artificial light. This work was subsequently replicated and installed in Bonn for RWTN. Across all projects, the methods developed emphasise the temporality of the landscape by capturing the changing cycles of light and dark and various qualities of darkness over multiple timescales, from the moment to moment to the diurnal, circalunar, and annual.

The SDUF was initiated by Steve and Louise Handley, who were the Environmental Services Officers of Slough Borough Council at that time. For this urban reforestation initiative, I developed a range of low power sensors to capture and communicate environmental data from areas of a newly planted urban forest to residents. The aim of this project was to engage communities with environmental stewardship while capturing the seasonal and long-term effects of tree planting on air quality and other environmental variables, such as soil moisture and photosynthesis.

The possibilities offered by this project informed discussions in 2022 with Arnside and Silverdale National Landscape in Cumbria, England, who were interested in methods of capturing and communicating artificial light at night. Their interest was in scientifically calibrated sky quality metre readings to support efforts to maintain and improve dark skies in Cumbria. This was not the direction of my own research, which was concerned with creating social and cultural imaginaries rather than scientific evidence. The discussion did, however, result in an introduction to the Leighton Moss RSPB nature reserve (LMRSPB), which fell within the Arnside and Silverdale National Landscape. LMRSPB is the largest reed bed in northwest England and hosts a wide range of wildlife, including nationally important breeding populations of bearded tits, marsh harriers, reed warblers, and bitterns (RSPB, 2024). The reserve is designated as a Ramsar site (wetlands of international importance) and a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI).

The reserve had already installed various technical infrastructures, such as wi-fi infrastructure and an Osprey nest camera, had excellent on-site technical and logistical support, and was very open to technology-based research. As a public facing organisation, they had a strong social and cultural interest in the approach taken by this research, including strengthening their relationship with the National Landscape, finding new ways to engage with existing audiences who use the reserve, and finding ways to create new audiences beyond traditional users. The creative sensing and visualisation techniques that I had developed (e.g. Griffiths, 2023) were recognised by the reserve as compelling means of engaging visitors with the reserve in new and relevant ways. Meanwhile, the reserve was of great interest as a site for the research project because of its context within the wider Arnside and Silverdale National Landscape, with its interest in reducing artificial light at night, LMRSPB nature reserve’s emphasis on nature conservation, the sites relative darkness at night, and its relative proximity to urban conurbations, such as Barrow-in-Furness, Morecambe, and Lancaster and other sources of artificial light at night, such as a nuclear power station at Heysham. The reserve provides a nighttime landscape that is defined by both human and non-human activity, without one overwhelming the other. On a clear night, the Milky Way is just visible, while the horizon is beaded with skyglow.

The reserve was thus agreed as the site for STLN, and I then went on to develop, manufacture, and instal a range of unattended light sensors to capture variations in environmental light during the night and day along with the corresponding network infrastructure, database, and visualisation tools. The sensors were developed to collect data every few minutes and transmit this via the long-range wide-area network protocol (GitHub, 2024; LoRa Alliance, 2024), which is well suited for unattended sensors due to its long-range and low-power requirements, allowing sensors to potentially operate for several years on a single battery.

A LoRaWAN gateway (radio infrastructure) was installed on the reserve to receive the sensors’ transmissions of environmental data, which it then routes via the Internet to The Things Stack Sandbox (The Things Network, 2024), a publicly available LoRaWAN network server for prototyping non-commercial projects. The data are then sent to a time-series database, where they are stored. This is used by a website (Griffiths, 2022a) and other devices, such as LightClock (Griffiths, 2023), to create time-based visualisations. These time-based visualisations, approached as artworks, aim to make the observations both poetic and meaningful, situating the viewer in the moment, while creating a nested representation of time that is based on variations in natural and artificial light and other environmental parameters over diurnal, circalunar, and seasonal timescales.

Various sensors were developed to capture different characteristics of the night and day. These included a three-channel light sensor (red, green, and blue [RGB]) that captures the overall colour of the sky at night; due to its high sensitivity, it can capture variations in moonlight and the presence of aurora. A lux sensor with an extremely high dynamic range and sensitivity was chosen, thus able to capture variations including the brighter light of dusk and dawn without saturating. Lux is the standard international unit used for sky quality metre readings, so this also allowed exploration of a proof of concept for unattended sky quality metre readings and visualisation methods that might be of interest to organisations such as Arnside and Silverdale National Landscape. Ultraviolet sensors were used to capture daytime and seasonal variations in sunlight. A 10-channel spectrometer was also created to detect daytime variations across 10 discrete frequency bands of visible and infrared light. This was intended as a simple phenology camera, located within reedbeds, to capture seasonal variations in spectral bands that reflect life cycle events, evidenced by variations in foliage and photosynthesis (indicated by infrared absorption). Finally, a temperature, humidity, and barometric air pressure sensor was used to capture further environmental context. This range of sensors, although sensitive and accurate, were not calibrated to be used as scientific instruments; rather, the intention was to use relative changes in readings to facilitate qualitative cultural imaginaries of the environment rather than create archives of scientifically useful quantitative data. Furthermore, readings were taken much more frequently than would be expected with scientific data collection. This approach was taken to emphasise nuance, unexpected events, and the sensors physical presence in the landscape rather than taking less frequent samples for analysis, generalisation, and modelling.

An astronomical all-sky camera was also installed in the reserve. The camera was oriented directly upwards, capturing a 180° view of the night sky, including stars, the moon, and occasional meteors and aurora, as well as satellites and aeroplanes. The view is ringed by a horizon of hills and trees, revealing many sources of anthropogenic light, including trains, cars, house lights, security lights, and sky glow from nearby conurbations, industry, and infrastructure. The camera, connected to a mini-PC in one of the hides on the reserve, stores images taken every 30 seconds from 30 minutes before sunset until 30 minutes after sunrise. Each morning, a timelapse movie compresses the night into about 30 seconds. These images and movies are sent to a server for long-term storage and to a project website, which displays the previous night’s movie and time-based visualisations of sensor-based observations. Although multiple parameters were captured, the RGB sensor and the all-sky camera demonstrated the most potential in poetically and meaningfully communicating the cycles of night and day and the qualities of darkness to audiences.

After developing and installing prototypes across the reserve, I gave a guided tour of the installation in the reserve to Dr Taylor Stone, a visiting academic from the Institute of Science and Ethics at the University of Bonn, Germany, who was also working in the field of night studies. This led to a collaboration on the RWTN project, replicating the Leighton Moss installation in Bonn Botanical Gardens, which is affiliated with the University of Bonn. The purpose of this project was to question and expand normative understandings of artificial light at night. It aimed to develop frameworks surrounding urban lighting by capturing and representing environmental light data using the methods previously developed to provide an accessible understanding of the variations in natural and artificial nighttime light and use this to engage with public perceptions and values regarding darkness. A longer-term aim was to develop nature-inclusive urban lighting prototypes that use sensors to respond to both environmental and human conditions and concerns.

Human-altered landscapes

Leighton Moss RSPB foregrounds the conservation of nature within a landscape that, despite its wild appearance, is profoundly human-altered and requires close management. The relationship between humans and the landscape is one of care and custodianship, while simultaneously serving as a space for the observation of birds and wildlife more generally. The non-human inhabitants, such as the birds, trees, deer, eels, reed beds, and water, are afforded a high status in the reserve. Being set in urban environments, Bonn Botanical Gardens and SDUF are more obviously human-altered landscapes.

The firsthand embodied experience of visitors at each site is of key importance – the direct experience of the landscape while walking through it or observing through binoculars, telescopes, and cameras. Such experiences are often mediated through technologies – from shoes, walking boots (see Michael, 2000), and clothing to optical instruments – that facilitate intimate proximity with the materiality of the landscape. In LMRSPB, through a network of paths and viewing areas, the landscape is rendered highly accessible to human vision. This is further facilitated by the Sky Tower, an impressive steel structure that gives panoramic views across the reserve and surrounding hills and open land, and bird-watching hides, which frame views over reedbeds, while creating a buffer between human observers and non-human subjects. Close and prolonged observation practices, such as bird watching, foster attentiveness to ecological and environmental processes during the day. Observing through binoculars emphasises stereoscopic vision and one’s physical presence, magnifying movements, and revealing fleeting behaviours. This contrasts with the monoscopic view of cameras, which are used to capture and archive rather than to simply be present and observe. These practices instill an atmosphere of attentiveness and collective hush. Such practices of close environmental observation are fundamental to negotiating a porous human–nature relationship and can be seen in the work of many artists and poets, some of which are discussed in the following section.

Embodied rewilding

What alternative strategies and methods have been used to adopt more-than-human perspectives on the relationship between nature, society, and culture? Extant possibilities include observing the environment through embodied and creative methods such as performance, poetry, or art (Buchanan et al., 2018; Cresswell, 2013; Griffiths et al., 2023; Hawkins, 2021; Magrane et al., 2019). In addition, bringing creative methods into conversation with scientific methods of observation (Barry et al., 2021; Hinchliffe et al., 2005) and using technologies to extend our capacity to sense and imaginatively experience the environment (Bogost, 2012; Gere, 2006; Mason and Hope, 2014) are effective strategies.

The work of the Romantic poet John Clare in the 19th century is characterised by an intimacy with the environment gained through sustained close embodied observation – a practice he referred to as ‘dropping down’: ‘I usd [sic] to drop down under a bush & scribble the fresh thoughts on the crown of my hat as I found nature then’ (Clare in Felstiner, 2009: 58). This was accompanied by a keen sense of loss and alienation as the enclosure of common land – particularly in England – profoundly changed the relationship between individuals, society, and nature. He was critical too of the egotism of some of his contemporary Romantic Poets, poets such as Wordsworth and Byron, who celebrated an expanded self as the ‘subject of epic contemplation’ (Kövesi, 2017: 88). Clare was similarly critical of the egotism apparent in political contexts, writing that the first-person pronoun should be removed from political discourse (Kövesi, 2017). He is often discussed as a protoecological poet (e.g. Morton, 2008: 188), with poems such as Clock O’ Clay imaginatively placing the reader within the life of a non-human other – in this case a ladybird (Clock O’ Clay) sheltering from a storm inside a cowslip bell. Kövesi (2017) suggests that Clare ‘wants a free plurality of “existences”, a multiplicity of free writing selves’ (p. 88); in Clare’s own words: ‘I am growing out of myself into many existences’ (Kövesi: 87). Clare’s poetic practice offers a methodological template for using intimate observation of the environment and imagination to inhabit an expanded and porous sense of self.

In an urban setting, a couple of kilometres from Birmingham city centre, United Kingdom, Hinchliffe et al. (2005) bring together creative and scientific methods, relying on close embodied observation of a local ecology to amplify the voices of non-humans. They approached traces of urban water voles as ‘vole place writing’—a script of footprints and faeces that is specific to place that can be read with the help of scientists. Rather than arriving at epistemological generalisations about water voles, this practice exposed unusual, situated behaviours, such as the voles’ peaceful co-existence with rats.

Scholars have also explored the role and limits of the embodied imagination for inhabiting the worlds of non-human others. Thomas Nagel (1974) examined this through the example of the bat – a form of life that he assumes has subjective experience but that has such radically different sensory apparatus to those of humans that an encounter with a bat can be considered an ‘encounter with a fundamentally alien form of life’ (Nagel, 1974: 438). He asks whether it is possible to ‘extrapolate the inner life of the bat from our own case, and if not, what alternative methods there may be for understanding the notion’ (Nagel, 1974: 438). He argues that while humans can imagine what it is like to be a bat – to fly around at dusk with webbed arms, catching insects; have poor vision and perceive through reflected sound; and spend the day hanging upside down in an attic – this only tells us what it is like to be a human imagining behaving as a bat, not what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Here, Nagel describes how the use of the imagination to inhabit the body of another cannot give us access to what it is to like to be that being.

Bruyn, in reference to Foster’s (2016) Being a Beast, writes that ‘the dominant modes of living at the start of the 21st century have blunted our sensory capabilities and harmed non-human creatures’ and to counter this we ‘should revitalize our senses and environments by actively trying to live and think like other animals’ (Bruyn, 2020: 1). While recognising the limits of empathy, he sees value in aligning human selves with non-human others through embodied experience. He goes on to discuss the work of scholars, artists, and writers who have explored how humans might listen to and hear the voices of non-human others through accounts of embodied practices such as the mimicry of animal behaviours – described by Foster as ‘literary shamanism’ (Bruyn, 2020). Foster attempts to inhabit the subjectivities of various creatures, including otters, swifts, badgers, and foxes, by adopting their habits. He mimicked the activities of urban foxes, from sleeping on the verge of an A road ¹ to sniffing through bins and eating scraps. Similar experiments were undertaken by Thwaites (2016), who lived as a goat for 3 days, attempting to integrate with a herd on an Alpine meadow. Thwaites not only mimicked goat behaviours but also physically modified his limbs and posture through prosthetics devices and carried an artificial stomach that could digest grass.

Human experiments with more-than-human empathy are not limited to living organisms. Reddy et al. (2021) describe speculative conversations between humans and household objects, employing Thing Interviews that ‘explore the scope and qualities of conversations one can have with everyday things at home if they had a voice’ (Reddy et al., 2021: 2). Undertaking fieldwork in Berlin Mitte, Bedö (2021) asks how we might align with a non-living technological agent – an autonomous bus and the algorithms that coordinate its movement – using a prosthetic device (a hand-held bus frame) and mimicking the behaviour of a bus.

Each of these authors is aware and explicit about the limits of empathy with non-human others, whether through embodied practices or imagination alone. Nonetheless, each example illustrates that their methods can help us become more attentive to the voices of non-human others, voices that we may often be unaware of or consider peripheral, invisible, or unwanted. They do so to varying degrees through practices that other the self by inhabiting the peripheries of normative human behaviours or thought. Although Nagel ultimately rejects the imagination as a valuable tool, his thought experiment nonetheless demonstrates precisely the kind of heightened attention to a bat’s body, sensory apparatus, and behaviour that can indeed help us become more attuned and attentive to non-human others. Each of these authors blend the self with the environment and its agents through processes that are both imaginative and embodied. Clare’s contemporary, John Keats (Letter to Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818, Personal Communication), captures this approach in his description of the poet:

A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity – he is continually in for – and filling some other body – The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute – the poet has none; no identity [. . .]

Observation and an attention to the non-human

Like the methods discussed above, the SDUF, STLN, and RWTN projects employed intimate observation and an attention to the non-human. They use environmental sensors for quantitative data collection and qualitative representation to encourage embodied, first-hand experience of the sites. They employ an aesthetic approach to sensor design and data representation. An aesthetic approach was applied to two elements in particular: sculpturally mimicking the forms of nature when designing the sensors and their housings and creating time-based representations of environmental observations over multiple timescales.

The sensor housings were designed to be sympathetic to the forms of nature (自然之形, zìrán zhī xíng) – an aesthetic concept drawn from Chinese antiquarianism (Hung, 2010) – found in the landscape, adopting the formal qualities of eggs, nests, and hanging fruits. These did not mimic specific natural objects found at the sites but rather drew from these to create imagined forms. The forms were created using 3D modelling and printing techniques to create moulds for casting or to create forms for direct use. The forms were textured, asymmetrical, and slightly lumpy to mimic the irregularity of natural forms (Figures 1(a) and (b)). Digital 3D models were created using Grasshopper and Rhino software. ² Grasshopper was used to create textured fruit whose overall size, shape, asymmetry, and lumpiness could be controlled by sliders. The rationale was to ensure that each sensor housing was unique, much like an apple plucked from a tree or a scholar’s rock (供石, gòngshí), selected for its unique, naturally weathered shape and capacity to evoke a mountainous landscape. The initial forms were used to create plaster or latex moulds (Figure 1(c)), into which the sensors were placed, and then filled with water-clear ultraviolet-resistant resin (Figure 1(d)). This process, though time-consuming, produced durable and weatherproof sensors. The texture is not only an aesthetic device – it also acts as a diffuser for the light from the environment before it enters the sensor.

Figure 1.

3D model created in Rhino and Grasshopper with dynamically adjustable form (top left). 3D-printed model (top right). Sensor positioned inside plaster mould–negative form of 3D prints (bottom left). Sensor cast in water-clear resin (bottom right).

Some sensors were housed in resin ‘eggs’, which were held in ‘nests’. In the latter case, attempts were again made to capture the asymmetry and imperfections of natural materials – adding random offsets, for example, and using a printing technique that sketches out threads rather than building up forms in a very precise manner (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

3D nest prints.

Further iterations were developed to facilitate more rapid fabrication in greater numbers. These hanging fruits were printed in a bio-based engineering filament in two halves that are screwed together (Figure 3). This filament was again clear and ultraviolet resistant, and when printed, is translucent, transmitting and diffusing light to equally illuminate the interior where the light sensors are housed. These sensors are lighter, easier to make, and repairs or changes to the sensors inside can be easily made, although they are not as impervious to the elements as the resin-bound design. The screw fitting between both halves introduced problems of alignment when using asymmetrical forms, and these designs were rendered as symmetrical objects about their vertical axis. Such symmetry is not representative of similar forms found in nature, giving these sensors a more decorative feel.

Figure 3.

Screw fit housing showing sensor in main body and weather seal on cap.

Initially, all sensors were powered by photovoltaic panels mounted on aluminium struts. This felt somewhat clumsy and required the sensors to be mounted on posts in open landscape such that the panels could capture direct sunlight. A later solution involved creating pairs of ‘fruit’ – one housing a sensor and the other a battery – that were connected by a wire that could then be wrapped around a branch, suspending the sensor in a more natural and aesthetically pleasing manner (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

Light sensor installed in a tree in Bonn. One fruit holds the sensor, the other the battery, and they are joined by an electrical cable.

Environmental observations were communicated through time-based artworks, such as LightClock, and JavaScript animations embedded in a webpage (Griffiths, 2022a). These function as environmental clocks, augmenting Linux Time with environmental observations (Figure 5).

Figure 5.

LightClock visualisations showing two lunar months of light observations from Leighton Moss. Each turn of the spiral shows light collected over a single day. The outermost spiral was the current day, while the innermost was two lunar months prior. Left: Two lunar cycles can be seen in the night (brighter yellow areas). Right: Aurora activity can be seen faintly on the fourth spiral.

The overall aim of adopting these aesthetic practices was to propose remote sensing as a social and cultural activity rather than one that focused purely on data collection and presentation. Although this approach has parallels with the principles of citizen science, which emphasise public participation in scientific research and the democratisation of data collection and analysis (Conrad and Hilchey, 2011; Dickinson and Bonney, 2012; Haklay, 2013), this work aims primarily to contribute to nature–culture imaginaries and to ‘tune’ individuals to their environments rather than facilitating a scientific way of knowing. This aligns with Gabrys et al.’s (2016) description of (sensor-based) sensing in an experimental forest as, ‘not about detecting information “out there” but about “tuning” the subjects and conditions of experience to new registers of becoming’ (p. 32). Such attunement to the environment extends beyond the relationship between environmental information and affordance (see Gibson, 2014), approaching attentiveness as a means of perceiving an environment as an unfolding of rhythms, flows, and process within which one is also patterned (e.g. see Ingold, 2023; Stewart, 2007; Tsing, 2015; Whatmore, 2002). Such ecological approaches also closely align with geopoetic ways of knowing that employ creative practice to situate individuals within environmental and earth processes (Buttimer, 2010; Ingram, 2013; Magrane, 2021).

The sensors and data were situated at an intersection between daily life, the landscape, technology, and art and proposed that both the sensors and the data that they collect should have audience participants. Unlike typical utilitarian sensors housed in weatherproof plastic boxes, the sensors designed for these projects aimed to engage people in the processes of designing, making, and siting the sensors. The story of the development and installation of the sensors is itself a story of collaboration and struggle with the site – from the clear and colourless ultraviolet-resistant materials to the screw fittings, the wire wrap, air holes, and the grommet seal and cable that mimics a pedicel. All the design decisions, tests, failures, and successes are manifestations of what the sensor is trying to measure, what conditions it needs to endure, and how it is powered. In this sense, the sensors were designed around their ‘needs’ for shelter, energy, and purpose.

The capture and communication of light data over multiple timescales situates the everyday within cascading spatial and temporal scales – from the momentary experience of light to the diurnal, circalunar, seasonal, annual, and beyond – starting with the simple observation of light in the present moment and extending this to include the physical rotation of the earth and its orbit around our local star. This connects the human sensation of light, technology, and the primacy of light for all life and earth processes. These works locate technological observation and affective experience as starting points to poetically access imaginaries of the powerful forces and processes that hold us in time and space (See Stewart, 2007; Anna Tsing, 2015; Whatmore, 2002) – in this case, the nested imaginaries of the biological, ecological, technological, and geophysical forces that shape everyday life. The use of technology as a proxy for the observer is intended to decentre the human gaze, replacing a perspectival lens-based gaze across the landscape with a device that captures a diffuse undifferentiated colour field. This eschews anthropomorphic multi-species imaginaries in favour of imaginaries more aligned with a primitive photoreceptive cell. The work thus adopts a hybrid position that begins with anthropogenic agents and processes but then moves both up and down in scale to situate the human individual within techno-, bio-, eco-, and cosmological bodies, materialities, and processes. Furthermore, because these methods point the audience or participant to spatial and temporal timescales and processes that encompass not only our past and present but also point towards both proximal and distant unfolding futures, they invite imaginaries associated with the changing climate, environmental degradation, and the Anthropocene term (Griffiths, 2023).

Participants

The approach described above is wilfully multivalent and open ended, inviting multiple responses. The value and affordances of this multivalent approach became apparent when various audiences were engaged over the course of these projects. Participants included members of the public, local authorities, advocacy groups, lighting design professionals, urban designers, and staff at each site, as well as academic groups, such as night studies, urban studies, and time studies scholars. Engagement came in a variety of forms, including public workshops, community group meetings, meetings, public events, seminars and conferences (both academic and professional), a book launch, websites, and an exhibition. Much of the evidence discussed here is anecdotal, drawn directly from conversations and unstructured interviews, while some is drawn from documented workshop events (for additional discussion of the RWTN workshops, see Griffiths et al., 2024).

The affordances and possibilities offered by the methods developed were seen through quite different lenses across these various groups. Several clear albeit overlapping areas of interest emerged: Reimaging nature–human relations through increased attentiveness and attunement to the environment; issue-based advocacy and solutions; value of methods for an organisation’s public engagement activities; and value of the methods for environmental stewardship and education. The following briefly illustrate these through examples drawn from various events.

Attentiveness and attunement

A central aim across these projects was to nest spatial and temporal scales to simultaneously situate the viewer in human, non-human, ecological, planetary, and cosmological imaginaries. One work in particular (LightClock) was used at several events (Griffiths, 2021, 2022b, 2024) to temporally interpret data at these multiple scales. At one event where it was exhibited and discussed (Griffiths, 2022b), the organiser described the timepiece as imbuing a sense of ‘vertiginous horror’ at one’s place on earth. A less dramatic response that nonetheless illustrated the work’s capacity to reorient the individual to the environment came from an attendee at a project partner event, who wanted a LightClock sensor installation in her back garden so that she could become aware in day-to-day life of the presence and changing levels of natural and artificial light throughout the night and take an informed approach to darkening her garden at night to increase biodiversity. Both are examples of a refiguring of the relation between daily life and the more-than-human through increased attentiveness and attunement to the environment.

Issue-based advocacy and solutions

A second theme that emerged was how these methods might be used for issue-based advocacy and solutions. This was evident in early partnership discussions with the Arnside and Silverdale National Landscape, who were interested in the potential for this work to create an evidence base to support their efforts to prevent increases in nighttime lighting through local policy. Similar conversations were had with other groups in the Lake District and Cumbria and two local authorities in the northwest region of England. As noted earlier, a limitation of the research in this context is that it does not aim to provide scientifically calibrated data, and the measurements provided by the light sensors cannot be compared directly to those of certified sky-quality metres. These conversations nonetheless revealed the potential value of such methods in gathering support from non-experts. The discussions initiated through the projects also revealed several issues facing advocacy groups working to mitigate against artificial light at night – they often have limited resources; systematic measurements are needed to make a case for support, which are time consuming; making measurements requires specialist equipment and training to operate it; measurements need to be made late at night; and there are limited tools available for automating such activities. Together, these factors present groups with a resource intensive activity and requires labour that is either expensive or must be provided by trained volunteers.

Public engagement

A third theme that emerged was the value of these methods for ongoing public engagement and audience development by public-facing conservation organisations. Interviews and conversations with successive visitor experience managers at LMRSPB nature reserve showed that siting this research in the reserve was of great interest because it created new and unexpected ways of thinking about the reserve that had the potential to reach and engage new audiences while still retaining a strong connection to the reserve’s emphasis on conservation and birdlife (for example, artificial light at night is known to affect the migration of birds and is responsible for many deaths due to building collisions at night). The development of sculptural objects to house sensors and aesthetic visual representations to communicate environmental data were seen as valuable means of engagement, as was the ongoing nature of the projects and their potential to visualise environmental data within a visitor centre. The works are also well suited to events that combine education, hands on activities, walking, and observation in engaging and unusual ways and indeed have been the focus of well-attended night and day walks and workshops in the landscape.

Environmental stewardship

These methods were perceived as having an important potential role in environmental stewardship, particularly in the case of SDUF, which had a complex and multifaceted approach to the purpose of this newly planted urban forest (a series of woodlands planted across the borough). A digital sensing layer was envisioned to share environmental data about trees, air, water, flora and fauna, and the wider urban ecology, including technologies and infrastructures, such as roads, cars, rail, and aviation. Future plans include data sharing through a smartphone application or website that allows people to engage with environmental issues. The digital layer was seen as performing several roles. One was to attune residents to the local environment through remotely collected data. A second was to catalyse direct engagement in stewardship activities, such as tree planting, care, and maintenance through environmental data-based workshops or through practical workshops that make things, such as simple sensors. A third aim was to raise awareness of the value of trees, as a surprising number of people were opposed to tree planting with some asking for existing trees to be felled due to the inconvenience of fallen leaves and bird droppings on cars and driveways. There were also plans to develop electronic science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (e-STEM) labs for local schools that would incorporate data from the SDUF into the local curriculum.

These few examples offer a cross-section of responses that illustrate emerging themes. These were taken from a range of events and activities often made up of specific groups, whether that be partner organisations, urban design professionals, local authority employees, lighting designers, and so on. A similar range of responses was also evident in open workshops held at Leighton Moss RSPB. These two workshops, totalling around 30 people, were attended by a diverse group of participants, from international visitors to retirees, university staff, and local councillors. It began with a talk by astronomer Dr Hannah Dalgleish to introduce artificial light at night and its various manifestations and associated issues through examples, such as the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas. This was followed by a talk by myself to introduce the STLN project, the importance of cycles of light and dark, the sensors and their design and function, and what the project has done and hoped to achieve. This was followed by an open discussion among the group that captured participants’ perceptions regarding the value of darkness and the methods presented. We then participated in a tactile workshop run by clay artist Kath McDonald, which involved making clay objects related to what one could hear in the reserve while keeping one’s eyes firmly closed. This ran to dusk, after which we guided a night walk around the reserve with an itinerary oriented around the location of various sensors in the landscape. Here, we walked together in silence for a while and did not use torches throughout to become further accustomed not only to the darkness but also the sounds that filled it. The second night was crisp and clear, and a sizable group stayed for several hours beneath the stars chatting about their experiences of the night.

Discussions captured during the event revealed a broad range of responses that again can be broadly categorised as attentiveness and attunement, advocacy and solution based, engagement, and stewardship and education. Attentiveness and attunement-related suggestions included reevaluating darkness and looking at what is positive about being in the dark, promoting the importance of being able to see the stars, using red lights at night (which maintains night vision), getting children used to being in the dark, and monitoring and communicating the effects of artificial light on wildlife and plants. The night walk itself was very well received and many were keen to repeat the experience. Participants had many suggestions regarding advocacy and solutions, from the reduction (or entire removal) of roadside lighting through sensing technologies or simply turning them off to the development of self-driving cars that do not need visible light to navigate, and better designed car headlights to reduce glare and the amount of light in the environment. Lighting around domestic properties was often mentioned, with participants suggesting better design, better shielded lighting to reduce glare, and the introduction of policy to enforce reductions. Some responses were specific to urban nature, such as reducing lighting near woodlands and their borders to protect bat populations, creating narrow-band LED lighting rather than the broad-spectrum white light, which is particularly disruptive, and nature-inclusive responsive lighting that would be less disturbing to wildlife. Suggestions regarding stewardship and education included raising awareness of the damaging effects of artificial light by, for example, involving local communities through council initiatives, primary school education, or neighbourhood initiatives, discussing the specific effects of artificial light on both humans and ecosystems, and education regarding the benefits of darkness.

A post-event survey of respondents indicated that the workshops had a significant impact on participants’ perceptions and behaviours. For 44% of respondents, it was their first experience of a night walk without a torch; 56% reported a heightened awareness of light pollution as a serious issue; 89% expressed an intention to use lighting differently at home and in their gardens as a result of the event; and 56% felt more comfortable in the dark following the workshop. All respondents stated that they would participate in another night walk without a torch in the future. Participants also sought practical steps to address light pollution, asking for information about local dark sky advocacy groups and examples of effective interventions.

Participant responses from the workshops indicated a high level of engagement with darkness and artificial light, the issues involved, and a great deal of creativity in how issues might be addressed. It was interesting to note that there was little discussion of safety and security with regard nighttime lighting in these two workshops and a general appreciation of darkness and the night. Further work is needed to understand why this might be the case – whether it was due to self-selection of participants, their response to the way the artificial light and the night were introduced and discussed, the location itself, which feels quite safe especially in a group setting, or some other combination of variables. It is interesting to note though that these discussions showed great breadth and nuance in the understanding of artificial light and the value of darkness, while discussions with urban design professionals and policy makers, who have professional grounding in the issues, often approach artificial light from the understanding that perceptions of safety and security are the primary issue for users of spaces.

The approaches to engagement described above could readily be framed within citizen science or art–science discourses, and they are indeed motivated by a desire to acknowledge the valuable epistemological and methodological tools of both artistic and scientific fields. The underlying emphasis of the projects discussed here is on how such tools and methods can be used to produce or capture sociocultural forms of knowledge. For example, although framed within discourses on artificial light at night, the development process of the sensors and artefacts was not methodologically oriented around the value that creative methods can bring to producing or disseminating scientific knowledge and discourse (although this value is acknowledged in the workshops); rather, it draws from scientific and technical methods of empirical observation, such as phenology, meteorology, and remote sensing, and artistic methods of landscape observation, such as poetry, photography, plein air painting, and sound field-recording practices (see Griffiths, 2023) and applies these to the (co)creation or capture of cultural forms of knowledge – in this case, human and more-than-human imaginaries of urban nature. By employing artistic and scientific methods of observation and description while leading with imaginaries of urban and peri-urban nature, this approach attempts to capture that which necessarily exceeds the disciplinary and epistemological scope of scientific enquiry – the feral liveliness and epistemological unwieldiness of a bio-, geo-, and technological ecology – while grounding these in empirical sensor-based quantitative observations.

Unwieldiness

Such feral liveliness was a key feature of the iterative development of the sensor artefacts and the infrastructure that supports them, which was marked by numerous unexpected problems and obstacles. Attempting to develop sensors that reliably capture environmental observations effectively revealed the porosity between human intent and the material environment within which they operate. Troubleshooting the failure of technologies ‘in the wild’ is a painstaking process, particularly those that are physically difficult to access, must resist the weather, remain powered, and communicate across a multitude of infrastructures.

The light sensors employed could be thought of as lensless cameras, capturing single-pixel photographs every few minutes to build an image of variation across time rather than space. Unlike traditional lens-based photography, which often hides failure, these time-based approaches reveal disruptions, whether technological, environmental, social, or cultural. This resonates with Gabrys et al’.s (2016) exploration of sensing technologies and their capacity to make visible the often-invisible interactions within environments. Gabrys emphasises how environmental sensors can reveal the entangled nature of technological and ecological processes, making the complexities and challenges of environmental monitoring more apparent (Gabrys, 2012). Specific examples of unwieldiness encountered across the three sites include:

Vandalism and Theft: Two sensors went missing, one due to vandalism and the other due to theft – although it is unclear whether the perpetrator of the theft was human or non-human. In Slough, an air quality sensor was removed from high in a tree and methodically disassembled in a park known for drug dealing and drug use. The case had been smashed open, the LoRaWAN radio antennae had been neatly snapped off at its base, and the microcontroller chip had been removed from its socket. We speculated that it may have been misidentified as a surveillance device.

In Bonn, a soil temperature sensor disappeared. Although it was physically removed from the garden, it continued to transmit readings that suggested it had been moved to a warmer indoor location. Later, it appeared to have been discarded outdoors again, before finally going offline. We speculated that it had been stolen and taken into someone’s house and then abandoned or had been taken by a creature, perhaps a squirrel that took it into its drey and later abandoned it outside. In either case, we concluded that the sensor had been consumed by some form of wild(er)ness.

Infrastructure: Bonn’s public LoRaWAN infrastructure initially supported good sensor communication, borne out by signal-quality metre readings taken around Bonn prior to installation. After several months of uninterrupted data collection, many of the sensors abruptly went offline, within a space of a day or so of one another. After inspecting a map of online gateways, it became evident that several of the city’s gateways had been taken offline, and it seemed likely that this was the cause. Installing a small gateway in the gardens and moving the sensors to nearby trees restored functionality, but there are still occasional losses, one of which can be seen in the gap in the spiral in Figure 5 (left). Furthermore, the Internet connections to which the gateways are connected are not completely reliable. In Leighton Moss, there are occasional power outages, which take the gateway offline, affecting all sensors in this area. This can also be seen in Figure 5 as a missing section of the spiral on the right.

Environmental conditions: In addition to the existing sensors in Bonn, a duplicate set were installed to provide multiple redundancy in a plastic box on the roof of an outbuilding. After some time, one of these went offline. Upon inspection, it appeared that water ingress into the housing had caused this, despite additional protective conformal coatings on the sensors. One battery, although selected to withstand outdoor conditions and a wide temperature range, had delaminated; another had become home to a cockroach, although this had no effect on its operation. After drying out the circuit board, replacing the battery, and rehousing in a new box, the sensors went back online. In Leighton Moss, two of the solar-powered sensors were damaged by deer, which tore off solar panels during rutting season, while wind in Slough moved solar panels on lampposts into suboptimal solar alignment.

Edge conditions: In Slough, four gateways were installed to cover a wide geographic area. During the pilot phase, with only a few sensors online, three of the four gateways were turned off to reduce mobile data costs. This had an adverse effect, creating intermittent reception of data from several sensors. LoRaWAN is a line-of-sight radio communication with each sensor making very low power transmissions, often from minimally elevated positions. Although signals can travel great distances in an open landscape such as Leighton Moss, they are not able to permeate deeply into the urban fabric or indeed through woods and forests. LoRaWAN is also dynamically affected by less obvious physical barriers, such as rain and mist, and moving objects, such as trains or lorries. Sensors that are at the edge of their range often go offline due to these dynamic fluctuations.

The unexpected: The SkyCam movies captured unexpected interactions. In Leighton Moss, they are occasionally used as a perch for owls at night (Figure 6). Both the Leighton Moss and the Bonn cameras are subject to extremes of weather. Both contain dew heaters to reduce condensation, but nonetheless, the camera would occasionally capture the formation of ice crystals in the winter, turning the moon into a fiery meteor; occasionally, it would capture a snow-capped dome that slowly melted to reveal the daylit sky. On May 12^th, 2024, both cameras captured the unusually energetic aurora display. The light sensors also captured the aurora, as seen in Figure 5 earlier.

Figure 6.

An owl is captured perching on the skycam at night.

The concept of unwieldiness underscores the inherent challenges in deploying and maintaining environmental sensors. These challenges illustrate the complex interplay between technology, environment, and human factors, revealing the limitations and vulnerabilities of efforts to capture environmental processes. In doing so, the sensors create knowledge that extends beyond their intended function of capturing specific environmental data. They reveal a nuanced description of all manner of biological, meteorological, chemical, electromagnetic, human, and technological processes and agents that unfold as an ecology within which the sensors are situated. This forced attention to unwieldiness can be thought of as a practice that further sketches out the complex interrelations of a site.

The unwieldiness of this technological sensorium relates to the ‘wildness’ of the environment in which it exists. While the RWTN project deconstructed the concept of wildness (Griffiths et al., 2024), exploring what it means in the context of human–nature relationships in urban nature, the term more generally tends to be essentialising, reproducing nature–culture binaries (Castree, 2005; Whatmore, 2002). When used in the context of landscapes, it is often understood to refer to that which is non-human, uncontrolled, and outside of human influence. It carries an implicit anthropocentrism and makes a distinction between human and non-human wildness (Callicott and Nelson, 1998; Cronon, 1996; Light, 2001). While the notion of unwieldiness shares some of these attributes, it also extends to include the human. The term unwielding is suggested as a practice that might augment the notion of rewilding: here, unwielding is used as a verb to mean ‘to become attentive to unwieldiness’. Unwielding, in this sense, suggests a flat ontology that can equally include the unwieldiness of biotic, abiotic, and technological agents – from the unwieldiness of excessive artificial light to the unwieldiness of the wind and rain, or the unwieldiness that exists between those humans that enjoy manicured gardens and those urban foxes that enjoy digging holes. Unwieldiness allows us to move from the essentializing nature of ‘wild(er)ness’ to the mundane reality of our entwinement with countless processes. Unwieldiness acknowledges the complex and interconnected nature of ecological systems, where human, natural, and technological elements interact unpredictably to create the landscape against which to understand value.

Conclusion: An ecology holds the technological sensorium

Through case studies with public-facing environmental organisations, this article demonstrates how an aesthetic approach to environmental sensing and data visualisations can foster public engagement and awareness, offering a nuanced social and cultural approach to complex issues, such as artificial light at night. Artificial light at night offers a rich area of study due to its many dimensions – from experiential, behavioural, social, cultural, and technological to biological, ecological, planetary, and astronomical – and its multiple spatial and temporal scales, from the embodied experience of glare or skyglow to the context of artificial light within diurnal and seasonal cycles of light and dark.

A key aim across the three projects was to create environmental representations that eschew didactic narratives, instead situating viewers within multivalent local and planetary imaginaries. The work fostered broad and inclusive conceptions of human–nature relationships that negotiated multiple perspectives (anthropocentric, biocentric, ecocentric, and cosmocentric), challenging dyadic conceptions of nature and culture (Castree, 2005; Stengers, 2010; Tsing et al., 2017; Whatmore, 2002). Participants, including the public, urban designers, lighting designers, policy makers, and public facing environmental organisations and initiatives, engaged strongly with these methods, identifying a spectrum of opportunities, values, and applications. These included their capacity to attune individuals to their environments, support issue-based advocacy and solutions, enable innovative public engagement, and encourage environmental stewardship. These methods also demonstrated significant potential to foster public discourse around the value of darkness and the night.

Importantly, the process of developing and deploying sensors and infrastructure was itself approached as an open-ended collaboration with landscape and technology that embraced the ‘unwieldiness’ of human-altered landscapes. This approach revealed unexpected detail about the entwinement of the human and non-human and the complex interplay of environment and technology. This offers a counternarrative to the apparent coherence of both aesthetic representations and the technologies that support them, acting as a reminder that both are held by and subject to physical, chemical, and biological processes.

By integrating embodied experience, environmental data collection technologies, an aesthetic approach to sensor design and data-based artworks, and collaboration with environmental organisations, these projects cultivated hopeful but critical engagements with future-facing environmental imaginaries.