Maya Churi

Andreas Kratky and I met last Friday to discuss the structure of my Directed Research which will focus on creating Experiment Cases related to my Thesis. These Experiment Cases will serve as technical and design prototypes in an effort to figure out what works and doesn’t work in experiencing the life of a Tree. The main focus of the Experiment Cases will be the senses that a tree experiences, from the scale of time to the sense of sight, to how sound is perceived.

Experiment Case #1, Play with Time. How does a tree perceive time? Fred Rochlin, a writer and performer, once told me that as you get older (he was 72 at the time) life goes by faster. As a young person one year of your life is a larger percentage of the whole – so it passes slowly. As you get older, a year is a much smaller portion of the whole and therefore goes by faster. If a Tree is five hundred years old, a few moments will pass in an instant and it’s memories might appear as fleeting thoughts or Déjà vu.

How do people interact with time as a tree perceives it? Can they move things forwards and backwards? Can they slow things down and linger on a memory? We can choose what memories we want to linger on, can a tree linger? How can that control be manipulated? What if a tree, whose memories pass by with such a quickness that it is hard to determine what is happening, can choose what moment to stop the flood of images and rest?

Experiment Case #2, Play with Sight. How does a tree see? Is it in color, black and white, shadow, texture? Trees have no eyes, but we know that you don’t need eyes to see, our other senses create images as well. What are the senses of the tree that make up an image? What is the visual eye through which the three sees? Do they see through the eyes that dot the trees trunk and branches? Do they see through their leaves? Up, down, front, back, everywhere. Does a tree see everything? If each leaf serves as a sensor to an image, are the images in duplicate like the sight of a fly or does the brain of the tree put the images together to create a whole? How does a tree see memory? The shadow picture – That shadow is the memory that lingers, there is meaning in the shadow.

Experiment Case #3, Play with Sound. Layers of sound. I want to have a series of audio files that start and stop depending on the movement of the tree and it’s environment. There are sounds... ants crawling on the tree, the leaves blowing in the wind and even external factors such as another tree being cut down. Those sounds I want to be created through instrumentation (as opposed to real audio of events). In Camille Saint-Saens Carnival of the Animals the instrumentation mimics the movements of the animals such as birds. I want to experiment with instrumentation that mimics the experiences of the tree. Then I want to layer the music, one sound on top of another. I love the instrumentation in Arthur Russell’s This is How we Walk on the Moon because of the layers that build through the piece.

Experiment Case #4, Play with Fabric. There has to be a divider that separates our world from the world of a tree. Andreas put it succinctly when he said the fabric serves as “a membrane between the two worlds.” The point at which you enter the world of the tree. I am drawn to, (I do not know the proper name) the carnival attractions where one puts their head through a hole and onlookers see you as whatever image is painted around that hole. A frog, a fish, a witch, a bird. If I take that concept and reverse it so that one would put their head through the hole and they would then be entering the other world, a black box or a dark room, like another dimension where you experience the life of the tree.



Notes on the experience:
Seasons and landscape changes
The colleagues of the tree
Umwelt of a tree
Potential meaning of how memories relate to eachother
What does the tree know?
Is it important what order these things happen?
How do I formulate the translation of the senses of the tree?
Sense of space? Above ground and underground The idea of growth

Notes on story:
Event A leads to event B and event B has to be the outcome of event A. We have to know why things happen.