‘Summoning a Forest’ is an artistic research project that investigates if and how digital art practices can bridge the perceived divide between natural and technological worlds.

From the controlled use of fire and stone tools to mechanical looms and computer interfaces, human history is shaped by our technologies.

The project confronted my overwhelmingly digital art practice with a parcel of real-world land, forcing me to find ways to merge digital with physical ecologies. It resulted in the explorative use of novel (consumer) technologies and applications, such as 3d scanning, augmented reality, and image sonification.

Their output, in turn, became part of artworks taking the shape of a vinyl record (The Compositor/Composing, 2020), information panels (2021-ongoing), and short experimental animated video works (Mistakes. The artist talk, 2020, and NGMI, 2022). The works will be detailed in chapters further on, but the research’s most important case study revolves around a terrain.

‘Summoning a forest’ began in September 2019 with the clearing of a spruce stand that had been in my family since 1964. The ‘little forest’, as it was known in our family, fell victim to a spruce bark beetle outbreak – one of many that is still plaguing across the European continent.

The cleared terrain looked devastated as it was almost entirely raised to the ground. It stood in shocking contrast as to how I, and most of my family, remembered it: a tall, dark, mysterious forested patch, the trees so dense their tops blocked all rays of sunlight. Over the decades, our little forest was the scene for picnics, games of hide and seek, and, though ‘little’, it was just large enough to get just a ‘little’ lost in.

The removal of the dead spruce transformed this familiar setting to an open terrain covered with a jumble of uprooted trunks, snapped branches and, notably, pieces of bark that appeared to be engraved with intricate patterns. These were the feeding tunnels of the spruce bark beetle’s larvae, as they gnawed their way through the tree’s phloem, cutting off their sap supply in the process. Each affected spruce could have been home to thousands at once. Across the ‘little forest’, there must have been millions of beetles.

On the clear-cut, there were none left. The insects were carried by wind to wreck another patch. The beetle’s passage was evidenced in the presence of huge amounts of bark-beetle traced bark.

The end of the ‘little forest’ marked the beginning of a new phase. With ecological concerns lingering in the background of my body of work for more than two decades, the clear-cut provided an opportunity to address issues related to global ecosystem breakdown more directly. I included the land in my research practice, naming it The Plot in that context. My mother, the terrain’s current owner, agreed to me being a temporary artistic custodian for the duration of the research. The Plot became an arena for ecological grief, and a gateway for investigations of the ecological and climatological entanglements that led to the little forest’s demise.

“How do you preserve transition?” artist Rune Peterson wonders in his film RAABJERG (2023), which deals with a parcel of his family’s land in the North of Denmark. In it, he describes a large sand dune, that is wandering across the peninsula. The dune is protected, but as it is heading from a demarcated nature reserve to privately owned land, it will cause problems. It will swallow farmland, roads and buildings, and eventually, it will vanish in the sea.

The Plot showed its first signs of regeneration in the Spring following the clearing of the little forest. At first hesitantly, but soon it became obvious that the land showed a resilience beyond expectation.

The research project ended with the disappearance of the evidence of the European spruce bark beetle’s passage. Over the years, the terrain had begun to regenerate a new little forest. In the Summer of 2024, young growth covered the terrain and the remaining bits of bark had decayed or had vanished beneath grasses, weeds and herbs. This marked the end of The Plot.