TREES

  A proposition .   The Immaculate corpse drinks the new wine. A simple way to pass ideas, where anything goes. Yet it is a game of consequences. To be taken seriously. to be thrown away.   Like the chain letter to the future. To anticipate what is to come. Please contribute the next words. Share an image of your choosing. To imagine a walk through. Our urban treescapes in 200 years.   I grew up near Skipworth Common. A World War Two airfield. Some patchy shrub land and woods. A place people go for their first driving lesson. They also do other things.   In 1940 the land was cleared. Pan scrapers peeled back the topsoil. Hardcore and tarmac leveled runways. Lancashire bombers flew. And flattened Europe.   Over 80 years the land was taken back. The runway strip looks like a scar healed over. Among the discarded shell cases. And rusted metal life began to thrive. In 200 years from...

 The ghost labs are in full swing.  The Dutch Elm people had a head start - they had been going for ages and had their own dogma associated with elms, and they even had an elm password and digital toolkit.  Ash people have a massive online conference every year with individualised avatars.  The Beech ghost lab was slow to start but now it is going everyone wants to join - they are the most expansive people and have the best after work online parties.  The Oak people seem sad. Maybe it is because they are often the oldest, and also the most frail, they find the avatar system difficult to navigate and often drop out at the last minute.  Elders and Hawthornes are positive, young, spiky and often identify as queer, their conferences are full of song and strife.  The sub groups, including Rowans, are quite superior and are trying to achieve cult status.  Down in the galleys of the labs the scientists sit and pore over the spores and try to get the real...

     I found my piece of writing about Europe in 200 years - I thought I had lost it. What will Europe look like in 200 years? Nation states will have eroded at the centres and the edges.   What used to be called wars will be skirmishes; people will all feel the same so will not remember what to fight about. Cars will no longer exist; long distance travel will be slower using solar powered airships that fly above the clouds. Virtual reality will be seen as a phase, everyone will be interested in feeling inside their bodies and experiencing life first hand. Technical augmentation of the body will be possible but few people will choose to have the procedures. Cancer, infection, blindness and most illnesses will be cheaply curable through programmable Bio Nano Bots. People will still be making art. The Sahara desert will be reforested in a massive global collaboration using underground water supplies and highly efficient solar energy. It ...

 I often think of Paul Nash and his photographs of dead trees in Monster field.  I have always been taken with the work of British artists like Nash and his brother John and Eric Ravilious and Tirzah Garwood.  They are close to the first world war and somehow their relationship to and depictions of the British countryside captures something that holds back a deep despair.  They paint utter desolation but also what comes before and what comes after.  Their fields and pastoral scenes depict a tightly controlled and managed countryside that somehow locks us into a feeling of safety and consistency. Paul's photographs of dead trees have a sculptural solidity of form that for me transcends the fact they are dead, they are melancholy but not tragic images.  I am thinking about a project I did a couple of years ago where we asked people to imagine the world in 200 years.  We decided on 200 years as it seemed long enough for things to have significantly chang...

  Yesterday felt like a big day for the Trees project.  First we had a great meeting about David and Chris's project - they are working with the Portico Library, Special Collections, the North-West Film Archive and the City Art Gallery. We had a discussion about whether this was a project about place or Trees but in the end we decided it was both. Having place as a focus made it distinct from the other projects, which was good.  We also talked very concretely about the bursaries for teachers and subject English and subject science and how we could re-invigorate both of them. We discussed this article:  by Liz de Frietas. She is discussing the limitations of sensor technology, but also some of the things it does. This is her argument:  T he EDA data points to our biochemical relationality, our bioaffective dispersal. This new empiricism binds multi-scalar subjects (human and non-human) together in reconfigured modes of existence, transforming human experience. We...

  I have been projecting things onto trees to see what happens.  These are ants that Alice made digitally.  Its interesting as you get very broken up images but interested and unexpected things start to happen.  I am also listening to the radio and lots of the news on radio 4 this morning was about following the science.  It struck me that if we had listened to Ruskin and actually  respected our world more and not allowed science and technology to change everything then perhaps we could of avoided the gathering storm clouds.  I do probably think or rather believe that science may hold the answers to some of the problems it was part of creating. It is probably our best short term shot at averting complete climate catastrophe however I don't think science alone can save us.  This is where the Treescape project sits in the attempt to build something different and question where and why science has and hasn't worked. Many scientist will say that the f...

The highlight of our visit to Seymour Park yesterday was the Anglo Saxon Man who came and built the hut. Time span i my head - was it recently the Anglo Saxons or weren't the Victorians more recent, and suddenly talk of 300 year old oaks and slow growing trees seemed fine. Anything was possible. It was also strange as Khawla had talked of the piece of land and the possibility of the trees being planted during the writing of the bid but nobody thought it would happen. The strangeness was in it happening alongside the Anglo Saxon man appearing and building a hut.  I am reading some interesting stuff. I bumped into David Shannon who is obviously one of the best read people, and he said I should read this book:  Exile and Pride Also Lalitha told me to read this:  Dear Science and other stories  and I have ordered this on Abi's advice:  Unthinking Mastery All this reading is good as it is beginning to unlock something about the space of the project. We are not going ...

 I think that on the trees project we should grow disciplines. Like two conquers in a single shell, they push together and change each others shape.  When you crack a conquer you are never sure if you will get one big one or two sharing. I was interested in how we talked about mastery at the meeting today in the context of Abi's planned work in Rotherham.  I know what it means from a feminist-eco-new-materialist perspective, although I may be wrong. I therefore have had a go at a summary:- New materialism replaced old materialism to an extent because it flattens the ontology of human with the world in general. there  can still have categories but they avoid hierarchies.  The human body and mind are not distinct we are bodies without souls, or separate minds we are just flesh.  This helps us to think of people as part of and not separate too the world.  We cannot master something we are part of.  It provides the strong connections and evolution of ...

1914 -1918   We the dead short days have  we lived-    Felt Dawn and watched Sunsets Glow I haven't read any Peter Kraftle yet but he sounds really interesting.  I have done my first full week since getting Covid.  I still feel a bit warn out but it is certainly at the edges now.  I enjoyed interacting with the trees project and doing the little bit of writing on Odd.  This is my week   Monday.  Reading for my Phd writing a blog post - catching up with emails about a projection I'm doing when a giant Puppet comes to Sheffield from Syria. Blogged for PhD.  We had a big discussion about film and ethics and what was possible Tuesday.  Shooting a film with Simon Armatage in the Peaks.  Editing and liaising with off the shelf . Wed .  Lots of tree meeting felt good at the end of the day like I had loads of experience.  Great to see Johan again. wrote 100 words of Phd on mending the Zip wire. Thursday.  Had a grea...