AI trees and the dawning of a new week.

 

I decided to make this morning a morning to be artist in residence on trees.  I kicked off this blog again because its a good place for us to work and think.  Ideas will fall out of this writing and it has long been part of our practice to blog together.   We do it secretly but hope one day it will be discovered and people will think we are clever.  I needed to take a break from shared blogging at the end of my PhD writing for all sorts of reasons but now seems a good time to commit to starting again.

I got up at 7.30 and came to my computer for 8, I sat down and wondered what I should do as artist in  residence on the trees project.  Reflecting on where we are now and my contributions I decided that there was something about artifacts.  Do date I have attempted to insert or am asked to make some things, perhaps not art but material and digital stuff that others can work with and riff off.  The forest school film - the after school club film my collage of the observer book of trees.  These are fragments that float in and out of the project - they are given little attention unless they are of use but they are present in the background. 

I was interested in the accidental and the unintentional when we discussed our data from trees- I wondered what the attraction is.  There is the long paper by Sarah Pink where she forgets to turn her video off and walks along a plowed field and records a conversation.  As someone who does this nearly every day I have always found the paper frustrating yet I see how its important.  In capturing the incidental accidentally we create something that if not authentic questions the authenticity of more intentional capturing.

The film above is generated from AI I entered the words "children" "treescapes" and an image of young peoples feet on tree roots from our workshops at Stretford.  The film is an artifact to have a conversation about, its also a  bit of a worry as the children are generated from millions of images of children on the internet. Having not been able to use images of children for a long time these little pic-tel Frankenstein monsters will become the new easy way to present childhood ethically.  The images in the film feel very accidental, there production is effortless, I have very little idea what they are or what they represent.  This is the important thing about AI for us to remember - the algorithms are beyond our ability to fully understand. We don't know what the we have taught the program to recognise in the words 'Child' and  'Tree' and children's shoes in an image and we don't really know what it has learnt, we just see something familiar in what it offers us. 

I've enjoyed my morning on treescapes so far and I liked your post on fragments I also like your idea on different ways to measure a tree.  I don't think there should be a 1000 though.  Partly as it reminds me of Reggio  Emilia and their 100 languages of children but also I think it might be interesting to just look at the different ways we measure trees. To say a thousand just means a lot and I think we may be able to describe 12 in detail which I with my scientific positivist brain  can cope with better.

The AI has done this to generate its treescape- measured trees in all sorts of ways we don't really understand.   I think that the idea of measuring trees should be presented to the group as an idea we can all come together around.  This fits with some of the initial thoughts about children's geographies and is a theme that runs through every aspect of the project.  First job is to get Johan to think about " What is it to measure something?" or perhaps a propostion - "  

 "There are many ways to measure a tree. "

Monday morning will be my treescapes morning for a while and I will try and produce an artifact for discussion - something to measure other things against.