this week's topic is Beyond the Computer Screen

branches. Yet, a few hours later, a wind blown through, the same space bright and opened out, charged with light; above, mewling buzzards and chacking jackdaws, below, on the valley floor, suddenly you see green spikes through old leaves and the water tensioned and amplified; the air vibrating with potential growth.

These differences - what they meant, the senses enveloped, the recurring act of being there - seemed important, vital, mysterious, and I wanted to record all this, dissect and analyse it, find an explanation, share it, lay out all the seasons at once and revel in them. So I photographed them for a year; not just a year, but for a number of reasons, a year and a day.

During that span of seasons the woods began to gradually inhabit me - a curious symbiosis - I was the parasite and they the host that fed me. I made hundreds of images on 35mm film. I found marvellous connections of facts about the woods; dug out the photographs of trips there with family and friends from a couple of years ago - 5 years ago, 8 years ago, 12 years ago - my oldest son's 7th birthday picnic by the stream, his little brother's 4th; recalled the visit on the day of my Dad's funeral when I saw a deer there for the first time; remembered scares with boys - sticks and eyes and a dash to hospital. Thought of past moments of sadness, worry, confusion, and others of quiet revelations and deep intensity. I kept a journal of my visits, recording my elation at spring and depression in winter.

With the aid of sponsorship and help from friends, family and the Forest of Avon I made an exhibition at Ashton Court Visitor Centre that I hoped felt close to walking a path through a wood. The spacious room with stone walls and wooden floor had large mounted prints suspended from rafters. The largest images were sequences of vistas in the wood through the year. A smaller set of more abstract forms and details were angled behind them. There were a couple of short looped videos, the notes from the journal, and dozens of small prints backed the largest images - repeat views taken over the 12 months; clues of past and present use of the woods and its wildlife; and finally the family album pictures, from the 7th birthday party through (by then) 14 years of visits.

It seemed to work - I was at the exhibition most of the time, many visitors spending an hour or so there and some returning, often telling me, or writing in the visitors?�� book, that they'd found it peaceful, inspiring, moving - like a visit to the woods. I was satisfied with the outcome wishing only that I could have improved the lighting, and added some sound to the exhibition, but lack of money, time and technical skills and resources didn't allow for that. I was pleased that I'd managed to create a good experience for visitors, but still wanted them to absorb it for themselves - share that sense of immersion that I'd found so satisfying. The Forest of Avon introduced me to Jim McNeill, a singer, poet, storyteller and historian and together we devised a day's event in the woods during the run of the exhibition where I created a

number of 'woodland gallery' spaces, hanging pictures in the trees that depicted the same scene at different times of the year. Jim responded to the stories and histories I'd collected about the place and as visitors were guided through the woods by a trail of images, they met up with Jim who sang songs, read poems and told a story around the fire re-interpreting the tales I'd told him. As the visitors left, they were sent to a den on an island in the stream where they were given a memento of the day - a small box of 'Woodland Wonders' - a set of miniature photographs from the exhibition.

Among the visitors to this event and the exhibition were Jo Reid and Richard Hull from HP Labs who later approached me with a great proposal. They wanted to know if I'd be interested in devising some soundscapes to accompany the exhibition images that could be delivered to visitors through headphones but using wireless technology - allowing sounds specific to each image to be relayed to the visitor as they moved into the area around each image. They were researching the different ways that people respond to sensory experiences and they believed the combination of the existing exhibition and the potential soundscapes would create an enjoyable and accessible means of testing the technology and its possible applications.

A slightly pared-down version of the exhibition was re-created in the atrium of the HP labs - a total contrast to it's original setting. The layout was essentially the same but here the pictures were suspended on steel frames; the lifts, staircases and balconies around the space creating both a different context and allowing an altogether new perspective on the work. Visitors came, were kitted out with a hand-held computers and headphones and set to explore the space - it became known unofficially, as The Wired Woods.

I believe the experiment was a useful piece of research for HP and for Armin and myself it was a great project and a really fascinating education. Many visitors to this version of the exhibition also enjoyed the experience, found it 'enriching', 'very tranquil', 'transported ... to a different place'.

But, for some others, who had been to the first exhibition there was a lack of satisfaction, sometimes disappointment. It seemed for them to detract from the earlier experience; the process of becoming immured inside the headphones meant you were unable to talk to your companions and share your thoughts about what you were seeing. You became isolated. You could no longer look at an image and just enjoy recalling the sensations of being in a place like that - your imaginative spaces were being filled for you. It ceased to be about the journey of maker and visitor meeting at a shared point of common experience, but became more of an imposition. Our collaborative process, attention to detail and concern with offering different choices and levels of engagement had generated a more prescriptive, manufactured experience.

A few months later, I was invited by colleagues of HP Labs, the Bristol Wearable Computing Group at Bristol University, to prepare an even more edited version of the exhibition that could be packed into tubes to take to a conference on wearable computing in Seattle. It was gratifying to know that my images and our soundscapes would be seen and heard by people from all over the world but curious to imagine how visitors would engage with this scaled down woods' experience.

"A formal evalutation of the prototype installation reinforced our belief that it is possible to create a convincing and compelling experience with the kind of technology that we can expect to become ubiquitous over the next ten years".

This was from a web site about the conference demonstration with a photograph of the display (in a low-ceilinged, polystyrene-tiled, fluorescent-lit room). Seeing my photographs in this remote way made me realise that the body of work I had started out with had become gradually transfigured through it's new application as an interface for researching wireless technology - my images had evolved into a set of seductive tools, perhaps losing a little of their resonance at each stage of this 'techno-journey'. This is no criticism - I knew the bottom line was about research and development, ultimately to find ways of increasing sales or developing further research; I'd enjoyed the project and this process also paid me a fee. I was just surprised by how the same set of images had become, through a series of re-presentations, enjoyable as a technical innovation but several steps removed from my original concerns with re-presenting the experience of being in the woods.