Maya Churi

Needless to say, I think this is a fascinating process you are using to attempt to derive an appropriate visual language for the way your tree might 'see.' Of course, we have no reason to think trees see at all, and if they did, who's to say they register the same range of visible light we do? Maybe they can selectively register a subset of the electromagnetic spectrum, an ability that humans would have had to sacrifice on the altar of evolution long ago in order to keep killing and avoiding being killed. Maybe trees, on the other hand, can practice something like the equivalent of virtual camera moves, orbiting through the spectrum at will, experiencing movement as a function of perception rather than the other way around.

Or, as your conclusion that memory is what is at stake in trees' perceptual life suggests, maybe it isn't really about the same kind of limited perceptual experience that we wallow in at all. I've been thinking about memory a lot because this is the topic of the issue of Vectors that is on the verge of launching. Chris Marker is still the person who, to my mind, has undertaken the most sustained and convincing exploration of memory, using both the multiply-linear format of cinema and the legitimate interactivity of Immemory. Marker aside, there is something a bit too formulaic about the visual algebra by which memory is typically represented -- fuzzy edges, evanescent imagery, audio and visual superimpositions and other tedious tropes. I almost think it's more interesting to think about memory in computational/algorithmic terms, which sounds like the direction you are heading.

It's true that we have a certain degree of agency when we remember, but a great deal of the process for humans is out of our hands. Put simply: we forget almost everything almost as soon as it happens. To do otherwise is to descend into the madness of Borges' Funes the Memorious. Humans can't handle the data load, even when assisted by the elaborate prostheses offered by computers and hard drives - we are simply crushed by a different avalanche of information. Trees, on the other hand, may be a bit sturdier. Funes spent all his time deriving systems of classification that he hoped would keep his memories under control. For trees, infinite recall may be a source of pleasure. Why shouldn't they practice a kind of time travel within the residue of their own recollections or create algorithms for recombination and transformation?

Theorists describe cultural memories as being rescriptable, at best existing in a dialogic relationship with historical events themselves. Far more important than what actually happened is what we need to remember having happened. Utility, politics and good old narrative drama are too powerful to be ignored by the likes of us. A guy named Daniel Rosenberg has done an interesting study of timelines and their widely varying strategies of rendering the past spatially. http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/13/timelines.php The analysis of tree rings, he tells us, did not begin until 1901 -- this was not the first time history had been visualized in terms of concentric circles, but he points out that this science, termed dendochronology, represented a historiographical shift from "floating chronologies" to fixed ones. Trees, it seems, don't lie about the past.

I don't think anyone will ever know the main sensory mechanism of a tree, but humans have very strong visual perception. Translating a tree's burned in memories to visuals is a great idea and I think your use of the pinhole camera is perfect.