UB artist part of public art installation at Brooklyn Navy Yard

Anyone making plans to visit Brooklyn over the next few months will be able to see and experience a new public art installation at the Brooklyn Navy Yard that features the work of a UB artist and architect.

Mark Shepard, associate professor in the Department of Architecture, School of Architecture and Planning, is among the collaborators on a project called Hedgework, an urban landscape intervention that takes the form of a sentient hedgerow that engages the public by using artificial intelligence.

The Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation (BNYDC) and its partners are presenting a series of events celebrating design as part of the NYCxDesign Festival. Among the events is a public art reveal and opening reception for Hedgework held on May 18.

Through an open call process in fall 2023, BNYDC invited local artists, designers, and fabricators to submit their proposals for public art in the forecourts of Building 92 and Building 77 at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a 300-acre ecosystem that houses more than 500 businesses and employs more than 11,000 people.

Creators were asked to respond to the theme of “transformation.” Proposals went through a juried selection process, with members of the selection committee drawn from BNYDC and community partners with public art expertise from BRIC, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, Roulette Intermedium and The Invisible Dog Art Center. The public art will be on view through Nov. 10.

Hedgework is a community of native plants and environmental sensors that create a biodiverse habitat that supports the butterflies, bees, birds and squirrels that inhabit it, while engaging the community members, workers, cyclists, pedestrians and others that surround it.

But the essential and unique transformational relationship the Hedgerow creates is the real conversation between human and more-than-human stakeholders. Its infrastructure helps to generate a series of feedback loops that provide many opportunities for playful response and interaction. Hedgework seasonally transforms over the lifecycle of its installation, growing, generating data, building knowledge and writing a soundtrack that reflects the climate and disposition of the site.

The hedgerow draws on real-time and historical-data streams to playfully communicate the state of its microbiome and the surrounding conditions. In addition, the installation partners with a composer to transform environmental data into a generative audio stream. Hedgework’s soundtrack reflects its environmental state and can be accessed by passersby, providing an ambient indicator of the present qualities and conditions of the site.

“Hedgework, in and of itself, is a community engagement platform that allows people to see, hear and touch nature in new ways, inviting understanding and experience with urban nature in the city rather than pushing it to the sidelines,” Shepard says.

Other collaborators on the project are Marek Walczak, Civic Space LLC, and Antonina Simeti, Timbre Consultants, with support from Robbie Lee, sound composition, and Wes Heiss, Civic Space LLC.