|
|
||
|
||
|
Liberate the Horizontal and Integrate the Vertical Super-Surface
 A very quick reminder that today is the last Sunday of March. That means it's International Tree Climbing Day! Go out and find yourself a nice tree, or any tree for that matter, and shimmy on up. Go survey your city anew, replay forgotten moments from your youth, domicile with arboreal creatures for an afternoon, get splinters and bloody scratches, serenade below with songs passed down to us by our hominid ancestors. Don't forget to bring the kids!
Forests as Paleoastronomical Observatories
 Scientists have theorized that a gamma-ray burst may be responsible for “an unusual level of a radioactive type of carbon known as carbon-14” found in ancient cedar trees in Japan. “These enormous emissions of energy,” explains BBC News, “occur when black holes, neutron stars or white dwarfs collide - the galactic mergers take just seconds, but they send out a vast wave of radiation.” If the source is within our galactic neighborhood, it might trigger an extinction event, or even something far worse. If much farther afield, say, in another galaxy, most of the radiation is absorbed by the atmosphere, where it triggers an increased production of radioactive elements, which rain down on waiting trees. Botanical daguerreotypes chemically etched with the remnants of dead celestial spheres; an organic archive of cosmic megaspectaculars. In a sense, then, forests don't constrict your vision, rather they add perspectives, telegraph your gaze into deep space-time. I can't resist the temptation here of imagining ancient Druidic sects of silviculturists, spread out all over the world, tending to patches of dark woods, steamy jungles and rain forests, astronomical observatories each manned by a hermetic crypto-astronomer recording supernovas, solar flares, the death pangs of black holes, and intergalactic jets of many dark brightnesses. And centuries later, Jodie Foster in the guise of Indiana Jones go out looking for their remnants, an orchid hunter in search of the rarest of rarest astral efflorescences.
Aerologging
 According to the Forest History Society, aerologging is logging with the use of blimps and balloons to transport felled trees. This practice, they explain, has economic and environmental benefits, as “[l]ifting the logs could help limit soil erosion, as logs would not be skidded along the ground. Logs also suffered less breakage moving through the air, and the use of balloons would theoretically lessen the need for additional forest road construction.”  Cue parallel world. In this parallel world, the world's rainforest are off limits to logging thanks to a U.N. Security Council resolution making deforestation a war crime. It was passed as a way to combat climate change. With the supply of precious jungle timber chocked off and the sub-par quality of wood from the still legal tree farms too offensive to the sensibilities of flooring aficionados and grain-conscious Scandinavian furniture designers, aerologgers are hired to provide them with some contraband logs. Just one or two, these smugglers and their clients reason, won't make much of a negative impact. So floating in on their stealth blimps, they scour the forest for some nice specimens, abseilling down with their chainsaws when found. Once felled, they haul the lumber up and make a run for the border and out to sea, where their cargo is dropped and picked up by speedboats in the night, bound for clandestine sawmills. Sometimes they find trees that, while much sought after like an Old Masters painting, aren't in the job ticket, so they mark their GPS coordinates for later retrieval. This inventory is like a map of secret ruins, whose artifacts can be selectively picked off depending on their client's wish list.  In any case, these botanical pirates are careful to avoid detection not only from the forest police but from other pulp traffickers as well, all floating in their own blimps. To avoid being spotted, they dive down below the canopy, all silence on deck, and bob to the surface again when the coast is clear — like an aerial narco submarine. If two belligerent parties meet, however, then it's a Master and Commander engagement of airborne vessels: first a cat-and-mouse chase through fog banks and tempestuous storms culminating in a proper aerial battle. There is also brief sojourn for ecological tourism. The Sands of Singapore Cacti Crime Distributed Bureau of Agricultural Crime Investigation
Integrate the Vertical Super-Surface
Perhaps just for a moment today, completely forget all your worries on the datum and go climb a tree, for today is International Tree Climbing Day! You flâneurs, drifters and urban explorers in your subterranean playgrounds: “liberate the horizontal and integrate the vertical super-surface.” You ramblers, hikers and vagabonds: forget those Norwegian show-offs and make your own DIY pop-up lookout platform. Burn those Winter reserves away and sweat the Spring into action.
Smart Forest
 A few years ago, in a patch of California forest, researchers were “linking up more than 100 tiny sensors, robots, cameras and computers,” giving them “an unusually detailed portrait of this lush world, home to more than 30 rare and endangered species.” Wireless motes, cameras and other sensors track the nesting habits of birds, the life cycles of moss and the carbon dioxide uptake of various soils. Robots move along wires strung from tree to tree, lowering sensors to take temperature, humidity and light-level readings at different levels. So when a tree falls in the forest, they will hear it. Always. In real-time. And over the internet. If you allow us to indulge ourselves for a moment, we're reminded of that scene in Red Planet (2000) in which Val Kilmer, stranded in the extraterrestrial wilderness of Mars but incredibly near the Mars rover Sojourner, used parts of the robot to construct a makeshift radio to communicate with a fellow astronaut still in orbit. A rescue plan is hatched, after which he has some run-ins with a rogue robot, stumbles into a swarm of oxygen-excreting native Martian insects, and saves the Earth because of that discovery. Stranded in the terrestrial wilderness of the forest but again incredibly near a smart patch, Val Kilmer will again cobble together a makeshift radio but this time out of dormant tiny robots to communicate with a fellow hiker still at the trailhead. A rescue team is dispatched, after which he has some run-ins with a rogue treebot belaying and gliding from treetop to treetop, stumbles into a swarm of climate change data saved by but not downloaded from the network, and saves the Earth because of that discovery. Returning to the first smart forest, when it was being implanted with sensing devices, “the field [was] young.” There was “an emerging world of very large networks that combine motes and portable gear with larger technologies to improve the depth, duration and range of monitoring.” Among these very large networks was the $200-million EarthScope, planned to comprise of “3,000 stations that are to track faint tremors, measure crustal deformation and make three-dimensional maps of the earth's interior from crust to core. Some 2,000 more instruments are to be mobile - wireless and sun- or wind-powered - and 400 devices are to move east in a wave from California across the nation over the course of a decade.” Another one is the $500-million National Ecological Observatory Network, or NEON, which then envisioned to include “15 circular areas 250 miles in diameter, each including urban, suburban, agricultural, managed and wild lands.” Each observatory would have radar for tracking birds and weather as well as many layers of motes and robots and sensors, including some on cranes in forest canopies. If NEON gets a green light, construction is expected to start in 2007 and last five years. One wonders to what extent these networks were implemented over the years. How much of the $1 billion the National Science Foundation saw itself spending on these ecological projects did it actually dole out? Are there now, together with Charlie Sheen's global-spanning blanket of missives, layers upon layers of eco-data giving us a totalizing view of the entire planet? Perhaps there's a list waiting to be made.
Arbores Laetae
 One item that we ended up not including in our survey of reclaimed under spaces is a proposal by West 8 “for transforming the 10.8 km disused railway line surrounding the city-heart of Gwangju [South Korea] into a usable green corridor.” One element in their proposal is a botanic bridge containing massive concrete tree-pots planted with representative samplings of indigenous Korean flora.    Which would creep along the entire length of the redesigned railway line in staggered but graceful steps. A forest on move and on the prowl for new vistas, rustling their branches and leaves melodically with their own velocity. Or not. On rooftops across the city and with binoculars on hand, people will wait for these walking shrubs to pass by and try to identify one or all of the specimens, which would be changed periodically. Treewatching. It's the new urban hobby. Or not.
Sonic Garden
 Another installation at this year's International Garden Festival at Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens is Soundfield by Doug Moffat and Steve Bates. According to the brief, this avant-garden is “an intervention that frames and presents this experience by creating an electronic sound field amidst the poplar trees – building on it, transforming it, and ultimately creating a woven fabric of sound.” As visitors wander through the site they will become aware of slowly shifting and changing sounds that are familiar but not clearly identifiable – the buzz of insects, perhaps, or white noise from a radio. Five sensors capture changes in wind speed and direction that are then translated into subtle changes in the sounds broadcast through a grid of small speakers and amplifiers that are distributed throughout the site. A conversation develops as the trees whisper back and the electronic sound field changes in response. But consider, meanwhile, Alex Metcalf's Tree Listening Installation, in which you listen in to the “quiet popping sound that is produced by the water passing through the cells of the Xylem tubes and cavitating as it mixes with air on its way upwards. In the background is a deep rumbling sound that is produced by the tree moving vibrating.”  Consider, as well, Markus Kison's touched echo, a site specific sound installation attached to iron railings on a hill overlooking the city of Dresden. There, the public can hear the recreated aural landscape of Dresden during a nighttime bombing raid in 1945. But to listen in to the sounds of airplanes droning and of sirens wailing and of bombs whistling as they fall to earth and then exploding, you have rest your elbows on the iron railings and cup your hands over ears. As explained by the artist, the sound “is transmitted from the swinging balustrade through the arm directly into into the inner ear (bone conduction) and cannot be heard by anyone else. Visitors suddenly get an idea of what it must have felt like that night; they travel back in time to this situation. Everyone by dealing with this terrifying event becomes a kind of 'memorial' of it. In their role as a performer they put themselves into the place of the people who shut their ears away from the noise of the explosions.”  Combining these two other installations, perhaps one could imagine a re-working of the first so that rather than the recording and listening devices scattered about the place, they are implanted into the trees. And instead of sitting on a bench or just standing there having reconstituted ambient noises blasted at you, there is a more direct, physical engagement: you cup your hands and let elbow and bark touch. Or you press your ear against the trunks to hear the soundtrack. And yes, you can even hug them, letting the vibrations course through your body — reverberating through your bones and echoing through the chambers of your lungs until they hit an ear drum, much changed and re-sampled by your own body. It's a Forestry and Anatomy mashup. To hear the sunless interiors of their roots, you'll have to lie down flat on the ground, on your stomach, your ear pressed against the soil. And who knows, perhaps the sound emanating from the earth and then filtered through a certain body type may sound incredibly like the otherworldly harmonics of Jupiter.
More Spatial High Jinks 4: Arbor-veillance
 PROPOSAL: Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power a maintenance-free, mesh-networked sensing system to predict and detect forest wildfires.  COUNTERPROPOSAL #1: Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power a remote arboreal border homeland security system. COUNTERPROPOSAL #2: Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power an apparatus which acclimatizes a parcel from its present northern climes to conditions last seen when the area was straddling the equator, thus enabling the survival of formerly native tropical flora and fauna. COUNTERPROPOSAL #3: Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power concealed speakers sculpting the extinct sonic landscapes of a former ecosystem. COUNTERPROPOSAL #4: Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power mobile telecommunication devices long enough for passing hikers, park rangers and loggers to send a couple of tweets. COUNTERPROPOSAL #5: Harvest the metabolic energy of trees to power fog machines which can be used, depending on your artistic persuasion, to render non-classically the very much classical scene of an aerosolized Jupiter raping Io, or equally classical scenes of wars and heroes, for instance, napalm defoliation during the Vietnam War. Agro-veillance
More Spatial High Jinks 3: The Forests of Isratine and Palesrael
  “Around Jerusalem,” write Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin in Chicago, “acres of pine forest are used as popular family picnic spots. On the weekends they fill up with cars, people, pets, barbecues. But in the early mornings, just after dawn, the forests are completely silent, serene and untainted, giving the impression of timeless landscapes in which trees have been standing forever.” But this apparent natural wilderness is a carefully constructed scene, as “many of these forests have been systematically planted on the expropriated land of Arab villages, which were forcibly evacuated and deliberately destroyed in 1948. It was not only sandy desert that was forested, but also cultivated olive groves and rural villages, the underlying intention being to obscure the locations of these villages so as to prevent any further cultivaton or re-settlement of the land by non-Jews.” “These are places of erasure and amnesia.”
Arbor tremuloides
A lazy post for a lazy Monday, but hopefully you'll find it interesting. It's a short clip from Our Daily Bread, a feature-length documentary produced by Nikolaus Geyrhalter.
Having never wondered how pecans and walnuts are harvested on an industrial scale and then seeing how it's actually done for the first time, we were quite taken aback. It was as if discovering a new species of marine animal thriving in the violent hydrothermal whirlpools of some deep-oceanic trench — spectacularly ornamented, wondrously strange, marvelous. Our reaction obviously says more about how far removed we are from the means of food production than anything about an inherent quality, but agricultural landscapes never fail to astonish us. On agro
The Politics of Palm Fronds
 “Fed up with the cost of caring for the trees, with their errant fronds that plunge perilously each winter, and with the fact that they provide little shade,” Los Angeles has declared war on its iconic, though invasive, palm trees. According to the New York Times, “The city plans to plant a million trees of other types over the next several years so that, as palms die off, most will be replaced with sycamores, crape myrtles and other trees indigenous to Southern California. (Exceptions will be the palms growing in places that tourists, if not residents, demand to see palmy, like Hollywood and Sunset Boulevards.)” Litter-Free Landscapes and The Politics of Pollen
The Technolicious Arboretum, or: 7 “terrestrial activities of aliens,” Part I
Either the trees have started to fossilize in a week, a technolicious process that usually takes 100 billion years, or the Earth has sprouted stainless steel roots, like an epiphyte in search of minerals, then pumping them all in, core-bound, to replenish an iron-depleted mantle.
The Technolicious Arboretum in Central Park.  It's also growing in Aspen, Colorado.  They're all over the place. This one has sprouted in Sweden.  Extreme Horticulture Revival Field Woof! Bouffant Topiary Protoflorafauna Edouard François
Wind Tunnel QTVR
Screen captures from some amazing QTVRs of a wind tunnel at the Office National d’Études et de Recherches Aérospatiales.
    Sadly, this wind tunnel is not a companion piece to Ski Dubai. But it should. And there should be at least one per billionaire Dubai prince. Michael Jackson, two. Surely landscape architects must then be invited over, some pines or maples or some others installed, and with those hypersonic, hypervelocity fans turned on, they'll sculpt and prune away a grove of phantasmagorical aeolian bansais. Their inner Axel Erlandson let loose.   
Cellular Infrastructure
A brief stop at the always marvelous Polar Inertia yielded these two photos of cell towers disguised as trees.
  Polar Inertia writes that “over four million citizens are now connected to the cellular phone network. Through the individual itineraries of its citizens Los Angles reinvents itself daily, creating an ephemeral urban identity in its airwaves. The boundaries of the city are blurring further as the interactions that used to happen in face to face transactions have now been transplanted by distance shrinking telephone conversations, e-mail and network connections.” Here are some more photos gathered from Googledom.    From one company: “The tremendous increase in demand for wireless towers has generated great opposition to the use of conventional, unconcealed structures. Both community and zoning requirements for high quality concealment are on the rise. Today, concealment issues may be the greatest obstacles to obtaining zoning approval. Preserved TreeScapes International's botanically correct tree tower products will help speed the approval process.” Arcadia Ersatz as a function of zoning ordinances.  POSTSCRIPT #1: As provided by a commenter, more fantastic photos here.
Litter-Free Landscapes and The Politics of Pollen
 It would be difficult to dispute the benefits of urban trees when it comes to air quality and public health, but Thomas Leo Ogren would like to interject. Allergy problems are worse today than ever before in our lives. Deaths from asthma continue to climb each year at an alarming epidemic rate. And why is that? In our urban landscapes we now have the most manipulated kind of city forest ever seen. In the past twenty years landscapers have grown inordinately fond of using male trees. In dioecious species (separate-sexed) there are separate male trees and separate female ones. Female trees and shrubs do not produce any pollen, ever, but they do produce messy seeds, fruits, old flowers, and seedpods. Landscapers and city arborists consider this female byproduct to be "litter", and they don’t like to see it lying on our sidewalks. It's the same old culprits: municipal budgetary restraints and culturally constructed views of Nature, which are in this case, pristine, uniform, certainly not messy, and definitely not variegated. In nature separate-sexed plants are usually about 50/50. Half of them are male and half are female. The female plants catch pollen from the air, remove it from circulation, and turn it into seed. Female trees are nature’s pollen traps, natural air-scrubbers. The False Forest
Nature is dead. Long live Nature.
 Collaborating with scientist Joe Davis, the Japanese “art venture” Biopresence plans to create so-called “Transgenic Tombstones” by transferring human DNA into a tree's DNA, so that instead of a cold slab of stone, the bereaved will be clutching and hugging trees in their moment of tear-drenched anguish. Which leads me immediately to wonder a couple of things: 1) Might tomb cities be soon abandoned and succumb to the encroaching forest? Gone are the crypts and mausoleums and the neatly tended lawns, and in their places would be the botanically re-encoded dead. 2) And how will this forest be designed? Will Le Nôtre as a model reign supreme or will Capability Brown?
Axel Erlandson and the Tree Circus
Every element to this fascinating story seems ripe for a feature documentary. There are the trees, seemingly extraterrestrial but undoubtedly man-made. There is Axel Erlandson, an arboreal alchemist with grand visions of commercial success but whose endless hours spent on his menagerie point to a devotion verging on the spiritual. There are the variable horticultural triumphs hinting at the fame he longed for but found difficult to cultivate. And then the neglect, the constant confusion over ownership, and the epic transfer to a theme park. An aberrant Wagnerian Philip Glass passage would be blaring in the soundtrack at this time. A wife, an architect (not a landscape architect), and a nurseryman complete the cast.
Someone contact Errol Morris!     It is a variation on a classic garden narrative — an eccentric, garden aesthete, the favorite of aristocrats or even an aristocrat himself, experimenting with forms at a grand country estate, which becomes the stage setting for social fraternizing. Amidst the part-Japanese, part-Egyptian, part-Classical regular-irregular topiary jungle, social conventions are strictly enforced. One faux pas and you suffer the same fate as Glen Close in the finale of Dangerous Liaison. Except when it's a deliciously illicit tryst, which everyone else would be having. And then circumstances of history lead to the garden's ruin, to the designer obscurity, only to be rediscovered and transformed into a theme park in contemporary times. Tourists now flock en mass. And well-funded grad students come for an hour and then proceed to spend their remaining grant money drinking and partying.   Wind Tunnel QTVR
Older Posts ——
Home
|
|
|
