FOREST TIME

2018 - ongoing

Forest Time is an ongoing series that began with Forest Time Fire, a performance/lecture that resulted in our lead character’s exile. She should have known that science can never trump capitalism. “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world in fact then the end of capitalism", she screamed in the middle of her lecture. An audible gasp rose from the theater. Forest Time Water, the next work from the series is more abstract and interactive, and our main character is missing, but the data remains as part of an intermedia installation. Sound and video clips can be remixed by inhabitants, with the use of capacitive sensors embedded in the 9 foot icosahedron sculpture. The sound is the product of and or inspired by sonified data from the Cascade Mountains of the Pacific Northwest, while the video consists of Google Earth imagery, data graphs, and artist captured footage from the surrounding forest, and university dendrology labs.

76 Cascades is a collaborative composition created at Jack Straw Cultural Center during a multi-generational workshop on data sonification. We built this composition in under 3 hours. More information about the workshop and Jack Straw can be found here.

FOREST TIME AIR

In progress:

Forest Time Air: Hello Earthlings is a radio play, set in an abandoned ranger station, where a time traveling paleo-dendrologist finds herself after being expelled from their time. Alone, inside a dusty communications room, the ecologist finds a modest record collection, with albums spanning back to when the station was first established. Fingering through the albums, our DJ dendrologist recalls the years, and the socio-ecological events that brought humanity to the year 2087. Humans have developed the ability to time travel, but strangely, can only successfully pass between the years 1987 and 2087. There is a race, to break the barrier, and go beyond the centennial zone (CZ). The elites travel back to enjoy clean air and water, and pillage where and when resources and trees were plentiful. They travel forward to fight for control over the people, most of Earth’s population, still left outside. “They have the power, but we have the numbers.” The Outsiders struggle daily but their communities are strong and resourceful. They use radio to communicate since the internet broke. They save saplings in hidden forests and grow mushrooms, that nourish the trees. They too have a means to trip time and they’re out there moving closer each day to crack the CZ.

Our lead narrator is relocated, out of her home-time, to an abandoned ranger station, hundreds of miles from anywhere. The Institute thought she’d be rendered harmless there, with no means to communicate, but that intel was most likely compromised by the moles living within the walls of the Elite Zone. Once she was able to get up and walk around, time travel takes something out of you, she began to explore and found a communications room with a radio, two turntables, and a few dozen vinyl records. With some skill and luck, she rewired the solar panels on the roof, put water in the batteries and could hardly believe it when the LED lights flickered, then glowed bright. The lights on the old receiver, radio and turntable came on, like tiny garnets and emeralds, glinting, signaling, in the cold black air.

Forest Time Air will exists as six broadcasts, each arranged around 2 or three vinyl records from 6 different decades, between 1987 and 2087. The last two decades will feature music from the future, original material, inspired by sonified data, mixed with track samples from all the previous decades. In between tracks our dendrologist turned DJ, DJ Tree, reminisces on the socio-ecological events surrounding each record release, trying to remember and make sense of how she, and how we all got here…

Research is ongoing but early picks for the year 1987 include, Arvo Part’s Arbos paired with Sonic Youth’s Sister and for 1996, Low’s When the curtain hits the cast and DJ Shadows Endtroduction. The actual records may change, depending on what albums or collections I have access too, my own, or others’ but the years will be 1987, 1996, 2005, 2014, 2050 and 2087.

1987 The Montreal Protocol was ratified by the UN in an effort to contain the growing hole in the ozone.