The sentient hedgerow at PS20 is a collaboration with teachers, administrators and parents at the Brooklyn public elementary school where each year, hundreds of students engage in hands-on learning through planting, studying plant and bee life cycles, growing vegetables, composting, and caring for their community. HedgeS will enhance the existing school gardens and Green Arts Program by making the invisible visible through sculpture, digital media and hyper-local environmental data – helping students and the surrounding community to increase their ability to see and understand nature’s nuances more deeply, and advocate on its behalf.

The sentient hedgerow team is currently working with the Green Arts Committee and Gardening Instructor to install an environmental sensing platform in the school’s learning gardens. The system will collect environmental data through a series of sensors and embedded cameras and tell the story of the environment in real time through a variety of interfaces, including a ChatGPT interface and a streaming audio app that “sonifies” this data to express its mood and reflect its environmental condition. Images and data will also be accessible to students and teachers via an online dashboard, providing source material for curricular activities. The team will work with the school’s International Baccalaureate Coordinator to support the integration of the system and data into arts, music, science classes and digital literacy activities (e.g. maker space) providing even more ways to address the topics of sustainability, biodiversity, our impact on the world and climate change. The environmental data, together with new ways to house and observe plant and insect presence and health will also help the school to better support a pollinator habitat, ensuring that plants and flowers in the garden thrive, help other local gardens and parks flourish, and continue to give the community access to natural, unrefined honey. Students, teachers, parents and the broader community will have new ways to collaborate with–and not just exist alongside–nature.