Close Encounters: Computational Conversations with Nonhumans in the Urban Landscapes of Karlsruhe

Is it possible to imagine how trees and shrubs, ants and birds experience the urban environments they share with us? How might digital sensing help bring human and nonhuman perspectives of urban life in Karlsruhe into public dialogue?

Exhibited as part of the Alberi Festival in Modena (7-13 April 2025) Close Encounters presents an intimate re-mapping of Karlsruhe from the perspective of trees, plants, animals, and inanimate objects in the city. The urban lives of these nonhuman inhabitants are explored and digitally recorded using a portable, self-built computational sensing instrument. A small, inconspicuous addition to the urban ecosystem, this sentient new “thing” surveys the fringes of minor natural spaces in the city. It tunes into the nonhuman entities that inhabit the urban milieu by focusing on visual, sonic, and environmental data streams beyond the range of human attention and perception.

These data-based perspectives of the city are mapped and presented as a large-format visual atlas that describes 16 sites for “close encounters” between natural and social life in Karlsruhe: From the baroque, domesticated nature of the Schlossgarten, to the thick foliage of mature trees and shrubs on the KIT Campus, or to anonymous green patches by large, busy traffic intersections near the Staatstheather.

Complementing the atlas is a series of short videos. These three-minute segments distil hours of data captured by the device’s short-range microphone and thermal camera, presenting an auditory and visual landscape that shifts focus away from familiar human cues: wind, insects, and birdsong occupy the sonic foreground, while human voices appear muffled and unintelligible—blended into the myriad modulations of the city’s rumble and clatter.

Reflecting our heightened awareness of the entangled fragility of earthly ecosystems, Close Encounters considers urban knowledge beyond the normative, anthropocentric sensory field. It unfolds an urban environment where the perspectives of plants, animals, and objects exist on equal footing with those of people in the city.