Open Forest: Data, Stories, and Walking-With.

Open Forest is a collective, experimental inquiry into different forests and more-than-human dataflows. The project explores how forests and forest data can be produced, thought of and engaged with otherwise, in co-creative ways that consider perspectives of diverse forest creatures and reach beyond geo-engineering, techno-solutionist perspectives. In this Situated Action, we build on our previous Open Forest activities organized in different parts of the world and take an experimental, hybrid walk in a local forest area in Newcastle followed by a co-creation of forest stories. Through these engagements, we hope to entangle the existing, mostly quantitative forests datasets with more messy and abstract data to question the currently available understandings about the forest as a resource to be used. Our aim is to support collective imagination and care-full sustainability actions towards flourishing more-than-human futures.