Outputs

Conference

International Association for Media and Communication Research 2026

IAMCR, Galway, 28 June – 2 July 2026

Trish Morgan, principal investigator with the SEED project, presented a critical overview of the project to an international audience of academics at the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) 2026 conference in Galway. The IAMCR is one of the world’s oldest and most international academic professional organisations in the field of media and communication. This year the conference took place across 1,700 papers and 400 sessions.

Trish presented in the Environment and Risk Communication section. Her paper noted the ‘interesting times’ of geopolitical upheaval along with the ongoing need to keep environmental issues to the fore of media and communications. She outlined the interdisciplinary influences that are core to SEED, along with its distinctive creative and collaborative methods, as well as outlining examples of works.

IAMCR 2026, Galway

Symposium

9th International Plant Gall Symposium

9th IPGS, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, 13–19 July 2026

István László keynote presentation on how creative practice can extend scientific work and act as a bridge to public audiences, drawn from the three-year insect series at the Zoological Museum of Babeș-Bolyai University. The SEED project was presented in the same session.

Knowledge Exchange

SEED Knowledge Exchange

Dublin City University, 16–17 April 2026

As part of our engagement with a range of stakeholders, the SEED project ran a two-day knowledge exchange event in April 2026. Drawing on the SEED project ethos of co-design, inclusivity and collaboration, we invited scientists, academics, creative practitioners, policymakers and NGO representatives to a two-day knowledge exchange event. This event actively explored how environmental data can be communicated through the five senses.

Attendees met with the project team for a project overview, before our creative collaborators each introduced their practices and responses to the SEED commission brief. Two panel discussions were held, along with five practical workshops where attendees got to work hands on with our creative collaborators. These workshops ranged from a time excursion and contemplations on water, to bringing code to life, working with local large language models and reflexive research practice. Along with this, we held workshops on how to use our project toolkit and explore our project database.

Workshop Series

SEED Workshops

Artist-led and interdisciplinary sessions

The SEED workshops formed a participatory strand of the project, using artist-led and research-led interdisciplinary activities to investigate how environmental data might be translated beyond conventional graphs and screens into multisensory, interactive experiences. Through experimentation with different forms of sensing, materials, technologies and modes of participation, the workshops created spaces for participants to engage critically and creatively with environmental data, while generating insights and methods that informed both the commissioned artworks and the development of the SEED toolkit. The workshops took place over two days.

Workshops

Day 1

Artists and the environmental knowledge community

The first day of workshops engaged participants from the artistic community, along with the broader environmental knowledge community, giving participants a choice on what aspects of the SEED project they wished to explore. For artists, Adam Gibney’s workshop Time Excursion 1: Magic Machines invited participants to create new memories of the future. It was a hands-on time-travelling and making session in this positive speculative design workshop. Participants were invited to think about new ways of imagining the kinds of data they might be collecting or telling stories about in the future. Also for artists, Clíona Harmey led the workshop Tipping Buckets, Words, Worlds, Stories of Water. This short-form writing workshop used a set of visual, material and textual prompts as a way of thinking through and engaging physically, materially and imaginatively with ideas around water and its effects at multiple scales. Using the limited word count as a mode of thinking through careful and frugal resource use, participants used a series of narrative strategies to explore the personal, global and cosmological aspects of water as a material.

For the broader knowledge community, the project held two workshops that focused on using resources that the SEED project developed. Aka D. Large and Shirley Coyle led these. The first workshop, Exploring Environmental Data Through the Senses, was a hands-on challenge-based learning session introducing the SEED database, where participants analysed novel communication of environmental data and reflected on different approaches and limitations. The second workshop, Designing Novel Communication of Environmental Data, was an interactive challenge-based learning session where participants used the SEED toolkit to develop and refine a novel communication of environmental data concept, supported by collaborative discussion and peer feedback.

Workshops

Day 2

The practitioner community

The second day of workshops focused on the practitioner community. Shane Finan led the day with a practical workshop on research practice for artists. This interactive workshop focused on managing the practicalities of being an artist, such as funding applications, follow-on projects, and maintaining relationships with partners. Fiona Mc Donald followed with her workshop Bring Your Code to Life: Serial Communication with p5.js. In this hands-on workshop, participants explored p5.js, a powerful open-source JavaScript library for creative coding, and learned how to connect it to the real world using Arduino. Participants were supplied with components, and learned how to use a potentiometer to generate live analogue data, send it through serial communication, and transform that data into dynamic, responsive visuals in p5.js. Cailean Finn focused on Scaling Down: Local Language Models. This workshop explored the infrastructures that support large-scale intensive computation and Ireland’s role in enabling such operations to occur. It focused on Large Language Models — how they are trained, how they function, and the ecosystems surrounding their development. A goal of the workshop was to explore ways to break dependency on the cloud by investigating alternative tools that are local, offline, and small. As a (small) form of resistance, participants learned how to run (small) language models on personal, low-end hardware.

Exhibition

Beta Festival 2026

Tower Space, Dublin — opening 6 November 2026

The six commissioned works will be exhibited together for the first time. Each translates environmental data into sensory form, across sound, scent, touch, taste and vision.

View Poster

SEED exhibition at Beta 2026, 6 November

Exhibition

ROSE GALLS — Hidden Architects of Plants

Zoological Museum, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca

The third and final exhibition in a three-year series using insects as models for thinking about technological power, presenting Diplolepis rosae and the bedeguar gall it induces on the wild rose.

ROSE GALLS — Hidden Architects of Plants, Zoological Museum Cluj. Photo: Makkai Zsófi

Exhibition

Cailean Finn: The Garden

Vašulka Kitchen, Brno, 2026