Another category of arts practices in urban green spaces is guided walks or tours of those spaces. These can range from walks which explore the history and culture of those spaces to walks which specifically prompt participants to discover something within those spaces – foraging walks and bat walks are run by rangers in the Salford area for instance, engaging citizens in the hidden ecologies of their local spaces.
In addition, audio walks or geo-located sound experiences, accessed through mobile applications and headphones, can guide participants through a space, prompting them to connect with and/or discover something about that space. For instance, Yonatan Collier’s sound walk through Boggart Hole Clough – a wooded urban park in North Manchester – ‘captures sounds of nature and conversations with the Boggart Hole Ramblers who know and love this beautiful park’ (Sick! Festival 2022).
Walks led by local historians might lead participants through green spaces, focusing specifically on the history and culture of such places. In Manchester, those conducted by Jonathan Schofield are a good example, focusing on hidden histories and stories from these spaces (see Jonathan Schofield Tours n.d.).
Another technical evocation of past presences in the present of an urban green space is Laura Daly’s The Storm Cone, again in Peel Park Salford. This bespoke application creates an ‘immersive artwork’ through combining soundscapes, with digital visual overlays on a mobile device to evoke the history of brass bands in the inter-war years in the UK (see Daly 2023).
Many of these artistic events and practices are united in their aim to celebrate, reveal and open up nature and green spaces of the city, either through inviting participants to explore and inhabit the spaces in creative ways or to reveal something about their history in an exhibition of work. They are rightly focused on the communities of people in and around the areas where the green space is situated and aim to draw those people into closer, more engaged relationships with these places through artistic practice.
In contrast, the artistic practices considered here occupy a state of ambivalence and complexity in relation to experiences and encounters in the green spaces of the city of Salford. They are not created to impact the mental health of the viewer, reader or listener, or to celebrate such spaces. Rather they focus on the feelings emerging in encounters with more than human beings and engage creative practices – sound, song and image making, text creation and live mixing – as ways of exploring and activating those feelings. In this affective focus and its live activation, it is interesting to position the practice in relation to what Lisa Woynarski (2020) terms ‘ecodramaturgies’.
The practices that are the creative outputs of this research process have a range of different disciplinary positionings and lineages. For instance, audio-visual performance can be connected to other live media practices such as VJ-ing and live media practice (Cooke 2010), as well as to my live intermedial practices (see Scott 2016). In contrast, the fixed media audio-visual mix sits more easily in a lineage of video art and poetry. Rather than outlining disciplinary-specific lineages, in the context of this particular inquiry it feels more useful to locate these creative digital practices in relation to broader trends in artistic and creative practice which is positioned in or responds to nature in urban environments. This in turn helps me to understand what this research is aiming to do which diverges from the primary intentions of existing practice in this area, regardless of its form or discipline. To locate and explore the approaches I have taken to creatively exploring encounters with wild urban nature in the city, I also turn to the concepts and practices of ‘ecodramaturgies’ and practice research projects which specifically focus on ‘sensing’ the city. Finally, I articulate these practices in their live and fixed media formats as generating an ‘ecology of technology’ in their processes and outcomes.
Many outdoor arts events take place in urban green spaces, as they are a convenient open space to hold an event where organisers might want to gather participants, without necessarily engaging with the specifics of those places, their ecologies and more than human inhabitants.
Other outdoor arts events specifically include activities that introduce local communities to elements of that space including its history and ecology and to celebrate that space, through creative activities such as treasure hunts and performances. A recent example in the city of Salford was the ‘Salford Rediscovered’ event, which brought together performance makers, writers, community gardeners etc. to celebrate key elements of one of the oldest public parks in the UK, Peel Park (see Salford City Council 2023).
Performances in green spaces in the city might also use the specifics of the spaces in question as sited backdrops or scenographic spaces for a promenade performance to take place
In these sited outdoor events there is a spectrum of engagement with the specifics of the space itself, from very little direct engagement, to employing the topography of the space as a ‘set’ or scenographic arrangement for a predetermined performance, to events that aim to bring communities into local green spaces to celebrate and learn more about them.
In mapping out artistic and creative responses to nature in urban environments, I identify some broad categories for creative practice in and in response to nature in the city. In this lineage review I have focused on examples from my immediate locality in Greater Manchester, UK. Though the trends that they indicate will not necessarily be replicated in other cities, the review does offer a useful sense of the range of practices I have directly encountered in this area. As referenced above, this in turn helps in locating the project in a contemporary context of artistic practice made in or in response to urban nature.
Other artistic practices might use urban nature as a starting point for creation (as I have done) and create artworks which respond to a particular green space. This was recently evident in an exhibition titled ‘You Belong Here’, linked to the Rediscovering Salford project referenced above. As the exhibition brochure states, ‘Through working with artists, many of whom are based in the city, these valuable green assets are revisited and explored afresh in the exhibition and the app. Rich stories are unearthed, histories are rediscovered and the seemingly mundane given a completely new and contemporary perspective’ (Taylor 2021).