Le_temps : explorations in phenology, is an ambitious visualisation project that attempts to respond and explore the contemporary phenomena of photographic imagery and human induced environmental change.

Tega Bain explains the concept behind the project and exhibition: “le_temps is a project that explores large databases of images querying them for records of flowering plants. The image databases include public collections like Flickr and those of organisations like Climatewatch Australia“.

“The project consists of software that searches for images of particular species and looks at the date the photo was taken to explore their seasonality. The study of patterns in flowering times and budding times of different species is called phenology. There is a growing interest in phenology as a way to study to impacts of climate change and many organisations such as Climatewatch Australia have programs to encourage people to collect this type of information”.

“Le_temps takes custom software tools to display large quantities of images and configures them to investigate phenological patterns through the dates associated with images. Perhaps we can produce phenological information from our ever-growing online digital footprint”.

“People interested in this project can contribute by recording phenology events in their local environments. They can do this through using the iPhone Climatewatch application or through uploading images to the project Flickr stream”.

The exhibition will take the form of a large-scale projection work, which attempts to render a vast quantity of digital images, sourced from the Royal Botanic Gardens herbarium, Climate Watch’s crowd sourced database, and publicly available images from Flikr, to showcase phenological events in an engaging and interactive way, with the audience contributing through documenting phenological events using the ClimateWatch app (free in the app store).

The exhibition runs form 6-29 March.

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