Abstract
?Natures Footprint in Performance? is developed as part of the RCUK funded Horizon project, a five-year investigation into the growing role played by digital footprints in the digital economy. The paper is a conversation between an artist working with locative, pervasive and interactive media and a scholar in performance studies and new media, both of whom are, respectively, a doctoral student and an investigator of the Horizon digital economy centre. Utilizing the trope of the forest as a case study, ?Natures Footprint in Performance? offers an investigation of how scientific and artistic interventions into nature have been performed and re-performed in laboratories, galleries and museums and are experienced by audiences primarily as traces and footprint representations. In particular, ?Natures Footprint in Performance? will offer an analysis of the similarities and differences between a number of works, spanning from art povera and land art, to works specifically attempting to represent the interaction between human and nature in the age of climate change, and analyze the evolution from trace to footprint. The paper will juxtapose scientific perspectives with critical theory and artistic intervention, and focus in particular on ?Dark Forest? (2008-), an Anglo-Brazilian art project exploring mobile technology in the natural environment, developed by Active Ingredient, in collaboration with Mobilefest and the Mixed Reality Laboratory at the University of Nottingham. The project, which contrasts and connects tropical forests in Brazil to temperate ones in the UK, aims to stimulate new forms of environmental consciousness.