Listening Forest by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

Back for its third and final season, Listening Forest combines light, sound, and technical marvels to create an immersive world waiting for its final piece: you. The forest’s eight interactive installations, each designed by artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, invite us to play with tools built for surveillance and transform them into instruments of connection.

From bridges of light carrying a stranger’s heartbeat to a multisensory wave of offered voices, in the Listening Forest you’ll have the chance to use your hands, your voice, and even the afterimage of your own body heat to create fantastical experiences in the dark. And unlike a passive light show or display, you’ll be able to direct the forest’s response at every turn on this family-friendly walk in the woods.

Set to a custom soundtrack composed by electronic musician Scanner (Robin Rimbaud) and open during the Ozarks’ best season, this really is an outdoor experience unlike any in Northwest Arkansas.

See you in the forest.

Some artworks in this experience contain light effects. Viewing discretion is advised for visitors with sensitivity to visual light stimulation. Hosts at each installation can provide more information.

Learn more about the eight installations of Listening Forest.

Arkansas Text Stream
Flowing from just beyond view, a rush of letters projects onto a 70-yard-length pathway, slowly traveling downstream. Moving according to fluid dynamics in a non-repeating pattern, the letters’ journey is programmed to be as unpredictable as the motion of water. As you walk, your body creates ripples and jetties among the texts. If you slow or stop, phrases will pool around your feet, revealing wisdom from the past, reflections on the present, and hopes for the future—all sourced from regional community members.

This stream of texts is ever-expanding. If you would like to add your own thoughts to this work, please submit your contributions. submit your contributions

Voice Forest
From a distance, a steady murmur of voices radiates from a stand of illuminated trees. As you come closer, it’s apparent that individual voices are coming from specific trees and are punctuated with lights that blink with the words being spoken. Three nearby intercoms invite you to add your own voice to the memory of the forest. Each new addition shifts the recordings from one tree to another, changing the overall hum of the woods.

This chorus of new voices is joined by an audio archive selected in conjunction with regional, community partners. They range from historic recordings to more recent soundbites.

If you would like to add your own voice to this work, please submit your contributions.
submit your contributions.

Recorded Assembly
Acting as an invitation to Listening Forest, the first work you see consists of three monitors. Across these screens, faces blur and combine into an ever-changing composite portrait. As you approach, your likeness is quickly mapped and mixed with a collection of 600,000 previous participants to create an abstract and constantly modulating landscape of humanity.

In its more utilitarian applications, facial recognition software like this is often used for surveillance, where it enlists biometric data to single out and police individuals. Here, Lozano-Hemmer employs the same technology to emphasize our shared humanity, creating a composite portrait of faces that revels in anonymity. The resulting imagery creates a poetic inversion of this software, one that emphasizes inclusion rather than division.

Pulse Forest
3,000 lightbulbs flicker in time to the literal hearts of the Ozarks. Temporarily displaying the heartbeats of the last 3,000 participants, Pulse Forest expresses the fleeting nature of life, where every heartbeat replaces the one before. Like a memento mori, the work is a gentle reminder of death’s inevitability, presented in a way that celebrates the beauty of presence and life.

Lozano-Hemmer took inspiration from a scene from the 1960 Mexican film, Macario. In a scene from this film, thousands of candles inside a cave each symbolize a single life. The artist combined that visual with the experience of hearing the dual heartbeats of his twins. Fittingly, the pulsing lights and gentle chorus of beats create a near-womblike environment in the forest.

Thermal Drift
This work features a towering projection and glows with the most generous use of color in the exhibition. Using a thermal camera, the familiar color scheme—sometimes associated with surveillance footage—is now rendered as colorful particles. As you stand in front of the screen, these dots gradually drift outward, bouncing and swirling around as you disrupt their paths with your own movements.

Synched with an audio track, a dark screen glitches and shutters in time with the audio before opening up to a brilliant screen of color and particles. As the track reaches its close, the heat signatures become more ragged and erratic as the entire image returns to black, and the loop repeats in an endless cycle of renewal.

Remote Pulse
Placed on opposite sides of the North Forest, two Remote Pulse stations connect strangers across the exhibition. A small terminal at either end has sensors for guests to place their hands. When both sides are activated, you’ll feel the pulse of the stranger on the other side under your own palms. Overhead, a set of pencil-lights pulse in time with the user’s heartbeat while crossing with the stranger’s pulsing beams above the forest.

An earlier version of this work, Border Tuner, connected participants across the US/Mexico border through heartbeats and the ability to speak to strangers. Constantly adapting to new settings, here Lozano-Hemmer removes the voice component and adds the lights, protecting anonymity as participants create their visible bridge of connection in the sky.

Embodied Light Beacons
In this installation, three giant stick figures meet in a forest clearing. Composed of limbs made of light, each robot-like figure waits motionless until you step behind it and control its arms, legs, and head by moving your own appendages. At this scale, all actions are captured as exaggerated beams of light that illuminate the night sky or enfold a fellow giant in a well-lit embrace. This amplification of size, coupled with the coordinated droning swooshes and sound effects of moving “limbs,” encourages you to view your own body in a new way.

Summon
A bridge spans a dry ravine scattered with an array of light batons. As you speak or sing, microphones on the bridge transmit those sounds downstream as white streaks of light cascading towards the valley’s vanishing point. After a few minutes of gathering sounds, the batons at the end of the ravine glow blue, a thick fog starts to form, and a cacophonous composite of the gathered sounds slowly creeps toward the bridge.
Eventually, this wall of audio, blue light, and fog engulfs you completely. Once the moment passes, the setting becomes quiet in anticipation of a new round of sound offerings. If the forest is always listening, Summon expresses that idea in a tangible way by giving visitors back what they gave to it.

Soundtrack

Scanner composed each of the tracks in direct collaboration with Rafael Lozano-Hemmer to create an experience that is atmospheric, dynamic, and expertly tailored to enhance the <em>Listening Forest</em> experience. <a href=”https://scanner.bandcamp.com/album/listening-forest” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>Download the soundtrack</a>.

The forest is waiting—are you ready? See available dates, choose your timeslot, and get tickets today.

Get Tickets