TREES

 I wanted to try and unpick the idea of the accidental image and why it was something that draws your attention.  I've decided that our best writing starts with a disagreement and an unpicking and us both trying to explain ourselves.  The first thing I need to get out there is the fact I don't really know what you like about the images that seem to 'glow' for you.  To me they are like the thousands of images that kids take where they do not consider anything. They just press the button as kids like pressing buttons- they are drawn to the sound of the artificial shutter release.   So it is something I find irritating and counter intuitive to consider all the images that I would naturally drag to the bin on my computer.  It may now get complicated as my positivist brain kicks in and I want you to - list the ways you love them.  Part of me thinks it may because of what they are not, their accidental and therefore authentic feel.  They are not ...

 Samyia and I spent the morning looking at the tree measurement videos made by the children. The more we looked the more extraordinary they were in thinking about trees differently. The range to the top of the trees. They hugged the trees. They explored the inside and outside of the tree.  In Dorset we looked at a Coppiced Ash that was over 300 years old and it was hollowed out. The tree-ness of it had disappeared and now it was a cave. It made me wonder, what is a tree, and how is a tree and who is a tree. I want to write the tree measurement article now - bring it on. 

  I have been working with Abi in Clifton Park over the summer we have done 5 sessions now.  Part of me isn't sure what we are supposed to be doing but to be honest I have decided that this is when we do our best work. I'm not that sure why I decided to do traditionally arty stuff for these workshops but that is how it worked out.  There is something about doing a trees project and drawing with charcoal on paper that seems to make sense - all the materilas are made of trees. I've also done some sculptural stuff with clay and Plaster of Paris. Its as though i need to find an artists identity in these materials though i am out of touch with them and have never had a good eye or hand for drawing.  The idea for Tuesday was to try and model drawing and looking and see if the Children would join in on some level - I didn't like my drawing and although the children did join in. they did it on their own terms. Abi was busy looking and chatting- when I got home I decided that...

  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 clu...

 The most exciting conversation we had on Trees was the data analysis discussion we had with Johan, Samyia, Peter and you. In my notes we started with the idea of snippets and what was there and what wasn't there and zooming out and zooming in.  I hadn't done my homework but I did a behind the scenes search. First I watched the videos - the hurried sounds, the tree stamping, the worms, the behind the scenes repetitions and murmurings of school.  I was interested in the zooming in and out and what we see through these images.  Peter talked of resisting the hermeneutical stance and responding but not interpreting. This is an image of bark - it is quite arty and would probably go down well at a conference but it was just taken but not intentionally.  I like the way this reminds me of a ship, the one we took to the Orkneys, in which we sailed for 6 hours from Aberdeen. Before we sailed we went to see the Wee Forest and it had grown.  I like the way the wire net...

    I read through some of this blog today and wondered why we had stopped posting on it.  I think its was probably doing my PhD but also I got frustrated with the trees project and how to position myself as artist in residence.  I think I intuitively felt I needed to fade in to the background.  Looking at some of the later post it also felt like we were both going through the motions a bit. I wonder now though if it would be a good idea to pick this up again and create our 'little thinking space".  It certainly feels like something an artist in residence should be doing. In some way been artist in residence on a project like this is more complex than other projects I've done. The cross disciplinary nature of the work structures spaces of difference.  On other projects it feels like we are building new spaces or Barthes "new objects" yet on trees with its science not science schism its more exploring what an alternative established position, approach, ...

  I am beginning to settle back into trees as I finished the massive distraction of my PhD.  Its good in some ways as I can use it to test out a few things and now with the new school projects we will have to make it 'work' which is the bit I'm good at.  I enjoyed doing the festival of the mind project mainly as we just did activities and ideas thoughts and things emerged.  This sounds really simple but perhaps its a problem with academic projects in you have to think of all the reasons why you are going to do something before you do it and this closes down as well as opens up possibilities. The really interesting bit about trees is how the art meets the science and I think it is here where we need to build something.  It isn't about augmenting or opposing scientific methods its more about creating a mix where questions can be asked and new thoughts come to light.  I think this is already happening but needs nurturing.  The science can be quite dominat...

  Your blog post went into an empty space which was filled with a baby and lots of excitement.  But I wanted to carry on thinking about listening to trees and i like my tree listening device. I met a composer this weekend who works for this thing: Treephonia I listened to his score and I also thought about this project:  Tweeting trees At the weekend we went to a concert in which the music was played on the cello with a fern. 

 Its funny doing a project where we are listening to trees - Its like on the Festival of the Mind thing I can be an artist and be playful and have some fun with ideas and then interesting stuff will come from it.  People seemed to really like listening to trees at the festival at the weekend.  Nobody thought it was particularly strange or anything.   I think there is something about stuff coming from stuff and just having a go at things and seeing what comes out of it.  I think that doing art can make things more playful and open up possibilities for difference and this is what we want to do within trees-capes.  Sometimes it feels a bit like the DCLG housing project where I loose my thread of whats going on.

In my work I tend to work through an ethnographic lens, situating small moments of meaning making within cultures and contexts, over time, with an attention to reflexivity and collective thinking (Campbell and Lassiter 2015). This work requires an attention to ‘small stories’ (Gorgakopolou 2008) and moments within meaning making when children and young people articulate something, or describe the world in a new way. I see the actions of young people as inherently hopeful, although what they say can be less so. Hope here is actualised in the small, particular moments, when a child might look at the skyline and observe a crane, or will look up and measure a tree. In Peter Kraftl’s words:  …the task is to understand how hope is figured through the matters, routines, and practices of everyday lives—in this case, those of young people. (Kraftl 2008:86) This idea of hope is situated in the lived moment of the everyday, and in that sense, hope is a precarious space (Nunn et al 2021). Mome...

  I had a thought today but as I'm not really blogging at the moment I can't think of anywhere to write but here. Its about trees so its ok and its also about research creation as I'm trying to tighten up the chapter in my PhD. So I'm thinking of doing my festival of the mind project and I'm going to be listening to trees and part of this is performance and part of it is real as trees do make sound and capture sounds so we have something to listen to which is real.  If we take a tradition research question orientated approach we could ask.   If young people are asked to imagine that trees can speak what kind of voice would they imagine and how does this "voice reflect their inner feelings and concerns about the environment?   Or we could go more methodological.   How does working with creative research methods that stimulate young peoples imaginations help us to understand the lived experience of marginalized young people and their engagement with global warmin...

 Is this what we are doing then - trying to work out how to communicate some of the science and enable young people to remain hopeful .    Do we want them to be hopeful so they can live their lives or so they will make change? The one thing I took from new - materialism via Barad was the idea that we are the natural world - we are not separate from it so we cannot destroy it or save it. We can only shape what we are part of. New materialism puts you in the middle of things along with everything else- this is ontological and not epistemological  hence the coining of the phrase Onto-epitomology  where we don't get to be on the outside of anything.   This feeling that humans - us,we, them, they, I are part of nature - not in a back to nature way but is a WE ARE NOT GOD way  - it is not up to us to save the world and this saving may be impossible - we have no ability to save it .We are not custodians for future generations we are part of the planet an...

 . .. the heat made everything different, the atmosphere loaded with fear and the climate scientists were all over twitter saying I Told You So.  I had a good chat with Simon about climate science- he said the problem with climate science is that it is too abstract, it doesn't put the concrete and everyday into the work, but just presents it. What is lacking is lived experience. I cited Peter's article when he says:       the task is to understand how hope is figured through the matters, routines, and practices of everyday           lives—in this case, those of young people. (Kraftl 2008:86) What it made me think about is the mechanisms of how we live our lives need to intertwine with climate science in a way that is more lived, more experiential and more socially linked.  This is the river where I swam - it is also the river where the young men came and recorded their sound scapes as part of the Voices of the Future proje...

 I keep wondering why I never feel very comfortable when we talk about voices of the future in relation to the project as a whole.  On the news this morning there was a feature about feeding grey squirrels contraceptives in hazelnuts so all the new forests can flourish.  I wondered what we would make of this on the trees project, if it was the right or the wrong thing to do.  The grey squirrel is none native and invasive so we would struggle to find a language to discuss this and have a discussion where we try and find appropriate language to discuss  this. My feeling is that the issue is something to do with scale.  scale in terms of the body, in terms of time, in  terms of size and in terms of possibilities.  I think that this is the thing that troubles me and I would like to get an idea of the scales we are working on.  Perhaps this is the next question art or me as artist in residence can ask the team.  The 200 years idea was a scale...

 I feel like I have been away for ages. Aberdeen was great and felt like an old school residential.  It was interesting because it proved again that we need to go away to be together, there actually isn't really a shortcut.  Even the terrible food in the hotel became part of things, gave us something to bond together other.  The story of sneaking out for Dutch chips and eaten them by the dock is as important as anything we actually said in the stuffy meeting room. I am always happy when I understand what a project is for and I think we are getting closer to understanding what voices of the futures is for.  Perhaps we should start to try and do the paragraph in the lift the Steve Jobs summing up as my brother would say.  Its one of the things we seem to be terrible at in universities especially the humanities. Here goes from what I know :- 'Voices of the futures is a project about education and learning. It focuses on listening to young peoples voices ideas,...

 Aberdeen was really good - it made me realise how embodied experiential ways of doing things actually work best. Johan said a very wise thing which I quote from:  These days encapsulated a vision of the project as a whole that begins to articulate the meaning of “voices of the future”. I very much liked your remark, Kate, at Bennachie that this IS the project and the way of working. I also very much liked seeing the emergence of the project’s own unique theorisation of what we are doing, along the lines of relationality, embodied and distributed cognition, language and communication and concrete utopia. Starting from “archaeology, ontology and architecture” I feel we are developing our own framing that may even contribute to a further development of that frame, as we discover ways to think beyond the Greek heritage that still marks (and mars) those terms: archaeology: the account (logos) of the archè (origin), ontology: the account of being (not becoming) and architecture: th...

 The blossom has gone now and small fruits are forming on the trees.  A large ash tree in the cemetery is dead due to ash die back.  There is something about trees and timescale which is interested.  Dogs are the same they run a bit faster than us and you need to accept that they will hopefully not outlive you.   I walked around the cemetery with Clare and thought about the roots of the trees connecting all the bodies, what was above and what was below.  I am going to make a soundscape and record the noise of the trees.  We may also listen to them with stethoscopes at the playground and try to work out what they are saying.  It was nice to be doing a festival of the mind project it made me think about practice and about building a space to hold something - perhaps an event.  I suppose the job of the trees project is axiological.  Guattari uses this word a lot in chaosmosis which is not an easy book but is sort of relevant here. ...

 I am in a conversation about a public dialogue about trees for next year run by the UK Treescapes programme. Plant a tree for 73 was all the thing as well as entering the Common Market in 1973. These are the redwoods in San Francisco. What I said is we need to do a takeover like is happening on Radio 2 next week on sustainability. I also talked about Nabil Hamdi and Small Change and also the Simple Stories work I said we should do a projection against the House of Commons.  It made me realise we have thought quite deeply about public dialogues but perhaps in a different way. 

I am reading your writing and it is taking me ages and I want to go and walk in the woods. While I was in Dorset I thought about the tree planting we did in December and I went and visited my tree. It wasn't very large and I thought about the timescapes of trees.  John pointed out this tree that had once been a pollard and now looked strange - it had been wrapped in a hedge a hundred years ago but had not stayed in one place. Trees are growing and changing and their timescapes are different from ours.   

The blossom is coming out in the cemetery. I photograph it every year  and every year it surprises me; how lovely it is and how much there is of it.  We had a good meeting about the Black Poplar today I didn't know much about them but was pleased they didn't look like normal poplars which are my least favorite tree. I'm always playing catch up at these meetings as I'm never very sure where it fits in to the rest of the project but the team were there and it felt familiar and I felt useful.  It reminded me of some of my other work brokering arts science partnerships and how the disciplines can effectively work together.  I then went on to try and do some writing and this got muddled up with the meeting as i didn't take a break to switch over.   My writing is about multi modality so I did a bit of reading and watched Gunther again on youtube   I know its not always useful to roll everything together but I did wonder about the potential to generate muti-modal...