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Mother Trees and the Social Forest- Trees and Mushrooms communicating with Suzanne Simard

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Woods at the back of Art Dept Jan 23rd 2023

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Woods at the back of Art Dept Jan 23rd 2023

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What about sunrise?

What about rain?

What about all the things

That you said we were to gain?

~ Excerpt from Earth Song by Michael Jackson 🌍

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Contents of envelope gathered by Refugees and Art @University of Reading 🖼 🌲🐇

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Contents of envelope gathered by Refugees and Art @University of Reading 🖼 🌲🐇

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Contents of envelope gathered in reading university woodlands by refugees and art students

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Contents of envelope gathered in reading university woodlands by refugees and art students

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Contents of envelope gathered in reading university woodlands by refugees and art students

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Contents of envelope gathered in reading university woodlands by refugees and art students

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Contents of envelopes gathered by Art Students and Refugees in University of Reading woodland  

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Contents of envelopes gathered by Art Students and Refugees in University of Reading woodland  

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Contents of envelope gathered in reading university woodlands by refugees and art students

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Contents of envelope gathered in reading university woodlands by refugees and art students

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Contents of envelope gathered in reading university woodlands by refugees and artists

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Contents of envelope gathered in reading university woodlands by refugees and artists

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Contents of envelopes gathered by Refugees and Art Students in University of Reading woodland 

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Contents of envelopes gathered by Refugees and Art Students in University of Reading woodland 

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Contents of envelopes gathered by Refugees and Art Students in University of Reading woodland 

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Contents of envelopes gathered by Refugees and Art Students in University of Reading woodland 

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Contents of envelopes gathered by Refugees and Art Students in University of Reading woodland 

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Contents of envelopes gathered by Refugees and Art Students in University of Reading woodland 

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360 Ancient Wood at Thames Valley Science Park

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360 Ancient Wood at Thames Valley Science Park

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States of Humanity- Alex Vermeulen (book images) 

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States of Humanity- Alex Vermeulen (book images) 

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Selection of photography from Vermeulen's book SOH 

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Alex Vermeulen 'States of Humanity' (SOH)

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Alex Vermeulen 'States of Humanity' (SOH)

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Each image in the book is given a number (#), and labeled 'Incident #'

States of Humanity is Alex Vermeulen's multi-faceted project examining life inside a metropolis. Using New York City as his reference point, Vermeulen has incorporated sculpture, video installation, photography, and documentary film to depict different aspects of urban experience.

Vermeulen's work makes reference to a city planner's layout, an imaginary structure of alleys, streets, avenues, and parks each with its own character and social traffic.

Also included are essays by Bill T. Jones, Lodge Kerrigan, Arthur Danto, Richard Shusterman, David Shea, Robert Greene, Martin and Annette Meyers, and Greg Lynn.

First published August 1, 1999

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Bhimji's work spatialises attitudes, gestures and movements- using photography, installation and embroidery. Allowing sentiment to stand on its own merit, her work confronts our reliance on written narrative instead, using light, shadow, colour and texture to recall the significance of intuition and cultural inheritance.

How does Bhimji's work relate to mapping and maps?
In recent exhibitions (see below links) Bhimji has directly used the image of the maps to reflect on colonial and personal histories. For instance (2), three children's dresses made out of maps of the United Kingdom, East Africa and India. Elsewhere (1) processes of embroidery create visual, geographic maps, that speaks to the notion of traditional forms and movement/mapping of knowledge.

(1) https://sharjahart.org/sharjah-art-foundation/exhibitions/zarina-bhimji/

(2) Tiny Traces: African & Asian Children at London’s Foundling Hospital - Foundling Museum

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'Lead White' (2018) by Zarina Bhimji at Sharjah Art Foundation

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Cut up map of South London and red sharpie pen. 

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This creation reflected on the South Circular Road in London (a major road cutting across south London), climate justice and how it links to racial justice. Air pollution along this road is rife- often exposing locals to pollutant levels that exceed WHO guidelines. Indeed, in England people of colour are disproportionally affected by - 3 times more likely to live in areas of - high pollution.

Here, using cuttings of green spaces, the south circular route was fragmentedly mapped out using red sharpie shapes. Interestingly the cut outs left a negative space in the shape of a hammer- as if shattering the usual fluid road lines on the map. I recall the statement 'in an emergency, break glass'.

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Pink stickers in a COVID 19 vaccine centre- set of 3 images side by side 

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The stickers were left over by the visitors who had passed through the vaccination centre.
Finding their way onto different locations on the gridded floor.
As if to say, ‘I was here’.

Capturing the notions of maps through photography of happenstance.

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Kit installed at Thames Valley Science Park

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Kit installed at Thames Valley Science Park

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Mapping, movement, institutional critique and autism....

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Mapping, movement, institutional critique and autism....

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https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/mapping-the-wander-lines-the-quiet-revelations-of-fernand-deligny/

Extract:

'Deligny and his colleagues continued their singular pursuit of “the network as a mode of being” — one that would be far less concerned with interpreting behaviour and experience according to the hidden intentions and secret desires of individual human subjects, and more focused on “tracing” the trajectories, detours, and wander lines that compose a given social milieu.

It was here that Deligny consummated his longstanding preoccupation with mapping the gestures, movements, and trajectories of the autistics living within his networks. He first experimented with cartographic tracing in the late-1960s in collaboration with a young militant filmmaker, Jacques Lin, who joined the group’s small desert encampment.

Deligny, Lin, and their collaborators began to follow their autistic counterparts as they made their way through the Cévennes’s rocky terrain, making rudimentary line drawings to indicate their direction of movement across the rural encampment and into surrounding wilderness.'

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FERNAND DELIGNY found many ways of describing himself: primordial communist, nonviolent guerrilla, weaver of networks, cartographer of wandering lines. A visionary but marginalized figure often associated with the alternative and anti-psychiatry movements that emerged in the decades after World War II, Deligny (1913-1996) remains difficult to categorize - an enigmatic sage. Beginning in the 1950s, Deligny conducted a series of collectively run residential programs - he called them "attempts" (or tentatives, in French) - for children and adolescents with autism and other disabilities who would have otherwise spent their lives institutionalized in state-run psychiatric asylums. After settling outside of Monoblet in the shadow of the Cévennes Mountains in southern France, Deligny and his collaborators developed novel methods for living and working with young people determined to be "outside of speech" ( hors de parole).

Militantly opposed to institutions of every kind - he occasionally referred to his small group as living like a band of nonlethal guerillas - Deligny was critical of the dominant psychiatric, psychoanalytic, and positivist educational doctrines of the time. He rejected the view that autism and cognitive disability were pathological deviations from a preexisting norm. He did not try to force the mostly nonspeaking autistics who came to live with them to conform to standards of speech. Instead, Deligny and his collaborators were "in search of a mode of being that allowed them to exist even if that meant changing our own mode." They sought to develop "a practice that would exclude from the outset interpretations referring to some code" - anticipating, by several decades, some of the central tenets of the neurodiversity and autistic self-advocacy movements: "We did not take the children's ways of being as scrambled, coded messages addressed to us."

Despite the extensive body of writing published during his lifetime, Deligny's contributions were largely ignored for several decades. (His posthumous obscurity has been, in part, of his own making: he increasingly withdrew from established channels of intellectual production and public exchange in his later years.) The 2007 French publication of Deligny's selected Oeuvres sparked renewed scholarly interest in his ideas within a variety of academic disciplines, but these conversations tended to be confined to academic specialists. Now, with the release this year of The Arachnean and Other Texts, a translation of 16 short essays dating from the late 1970s, the small but industrious Univocal press has offered a wider English-language readership the chance to encounter Deligny's strange and affecting work for the first time.

Translated by Drew Burk and Catherine Porter, The Arachnean and Other Texts is not an easy read. Deligny's prose is elliptical, fragmentary, and often mystifying. His writerly voice is hard to locate genre-wise, skirting between philosophy and poetry, anthropological observation and quasi-prophetic (if emphatically secular) aphorism. Deligny seems to have approached the practice of writing with the same spirit of open-ended, improvisatory experimentation that characterized his various attempts at radically anti-institutional communal living. Conducting research at his archives in France last summer, I was confronted by intimidating stacks of butcher paper covered with Deligny's tiny, barely legible pencil scrawls - almost all of it unpublished, and probably still unread.

Yet patient readers will find this book shimmering with quiet revelations. In place of orderly, coherent interpretive systems, Deligny attunes his reader to the lower frequencies of a life lived on the margins. His essays evoke the austere desert terrain of the Cévennes Mountains where he and his collaborators spent much of their time living in relative isolation; his deeply impressionistic writing surveys this landscape for its minor stirrings, and strives to imagine new arrangements of common life.

¤

Deligny was born to a middle-class military family in 1913. He studied psychology and philosophy at the University of Lille before securing a position as a special education instructor for children and adolescents at a psychiatric asylum at Armentières in 1938. He joined the French resistance to German occupation during the war, and continued to pursue his educational work with mentally disabled children while stationed in Lille. In 1948, with the financial support of the prominent educational theorist Henri Wallon, he founded La Grande Cordée (The Great Cord), a collectively run, loosely organized group of educators and psychiatrists seeking to develop an alternative to the bureaucratic and frequently abusive state-run psychiatric and juvenile delinquent systems. (In his recent joint biography of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, François Dosse describes La Grande Cordée as "the first experiment in outpatient treatment designed to keep adolescent delinquents out of psychiatric hospitals.") Its initial headquarters was located in an abandoned Parisian theater, which Deligny transformed into a kind of ad hoc youth drop-in center.

In 1953, La Grande Cordée lost its state financing, and Deligny was forced to give up his headquarters. The group sought ways of continuing their activities in "nomadic" form, moving their operations to a series of temporary encampments in different rural locations throughout the country. Deligny looks back on this period in the essay that gives the newly published translation its title. In "The Arachnean," he describes the fragile series of networks ( réseaux, in French) that emerged from the original ambitions of La Grande Cordée in ensuing decades. Likening himself to a spider, Deligny writes, "from my earliest years I have always had some network to weave," before going on to ask: "But can we say that the spider's project is to weave its web? I don't think so. We might as well say the web's project is to be woven."

This sort of gentle blurring of will between weaver and web is characteristic of Deligny's way of thinking: he favored small gestures, singular trajectories, and provisional arrangements of acting and living over models of personhood founded upon rigid conceptions of individual agency and sovereign autonomy. Like a spider's web, a network is always in formation for Deligny, always in the midst of being built and maintained in compositional responsiveness to its environment. It is a precarious enterprise, in perpetual danger of either falling apart or, alternatively, rigidifying into an institution. (It is not surprising, given all of this, that Deligny was an important influence on Deleuze and Guattari's later elaboration of the rhizome.)

The curious Deligninan neologism "Arachnean" ( Arachnéen) gestures toward the web-weaving propensities of the spider as the basis for imagining a different mode of social organization - indeed, an entirely new political ethos - that would not be structured around the assumption of universal access to language and speech. To speak of the Arachnean, Deligny writes at one point, is "rather like evoking a bygone epoch, an age, an era" - an imaginary analogue to terms like the Pleistocene or the Bronze Age. In another, almost Borgesian passage, Deligny remarks that the term might conjure a forgotten, mythological civilization: "I could have imagined a people and spoken of Arachnides as one speaks of Atlantis," and tried to make "my tale so attractive that the Arachneans would have begun to exist in human memory."

By the mid-1960s, Deligny's group found itself in increasingly dire financial straits. In 1966, he and several of his collaborators were invited to pursue their work at La Borde, the famously heterodox psychiatric clinic founded by the communist psychiatrist Jean Oury, then under the direction of Félix Guattari (it was common for patients and clinicians at La Borde to take turns analyzing one another). While living there, Deligny attended a few of the seminars given by Jacques Lacan, whose ideas were then the dominant influence on La Borde's crew of radical clinicians. Yet Deligny quickly realized how drastically his own ideas diverged from those of Oury, Guattari, and Lacan. "For me, psychoanalysis is a curiously foreign language," he writes in one of the other essays included in The Arachnean and Other Texts; it was impossible to square psychoanalysis with his own commitment to cultivating models of collective life untethered from the bedrock primacy of language. The symbolic order made famous by Lacan, Deligny writes, "is not merely dominant but [...] excludes all other forms of relation. The Arachnean is a way of evoking these other forms."

Accordingly, Deligny developed an understanding of autism that was far different than the predominant psychiatric models of his era, especially those influenced by rigidified and institutionalized versions of psychoanalysis. For him, autism was a mode of being, like any other - but one whose true qualities had been obscured by a rapidly proliferating series of political and scientific discourses that, in turn, had led to stigmatizing and frequently harmful forms of treatment, surveillance, and social control. Indeed, psychoanalysis has had a generally abysmal track record when it comes to autism - one need only think of Bruno Bettelheim's pseudo-Freudian theories, popularized in the 1960s, blaming the condition on emotionally remote "refrigerator mothers." Deligny rejected the dominant understanding of autism as a condition that "entrapped" children and rendered them incapable of forming emotional attachments to others.

In that same essay on psychoanalysis, titled (tellingly) "The Charade," he writes about the concept of the "real" in psychoanalytic discourse, and its disorienting effect:

The real: it seems to me that I have come across this word in texts written in the French language, no doubt about that, but owing to the fact that that language is double and at the very least has double meanings, goes in two directions, it swept the words away from under my nose, and then, now you see them now you don't, who knows what became of them in that waltz whose music I don't perceive.

It is completely discouraging to hold a word in sight, and see it spin around, pair with others, join a constellation, like a string of beads; in fact it escapes you like a ball on a playground; others play with it cheerfully, but what are they playing at, what's their game? It's a mystery.

As this passage indicates, Deligny possessed a poet's sly distrust of language: the essays included in The Arachnean and Other Texts often play upon the phonetic resonances of words in order to disrupt familiar continuities between sound and sense. (Burk and Porter make an admirable effort to find English equivalents for such idiomatic effects.) For all the difficulties this poses for the translators, this is a fitting approach for someone so determined to unsettle the authority of speech, and to contesting language's privileged role in securing the human subject's commerce with the world. "Word-pucks sometimes change," he writes. "Inevitably words become charged with meaning and begin to slide into the formulation of the attempt [ tentative] and elaborate their own premature micro-ideology." Pressing up against the ideological slide of language, Deligny looks for ways to "disgorge these meanings." He is especially attentive to the phonetic ambiguity, in French, between "that" ( ce) and "self"- ( se: the third person reflexive pronoun): he holds up for inspection any given "that" encountered in the world - that stone, that being, that child - before it coheres into a state of being attributable to a self-reflexive speaking subject: "There is that [CE] way of seeing and there is seeing the SELF or an OTHER [SE]."

The way in which Deligny breaks down language into its constituent phonetic components can make his peculiar prose difficult to follow, especially when encountered in translation. But the cumulative effect of this semantic playfulness also makes for a mesmerizing read, as if he were using the blockiness of language against itself in order to chip away at the ideological sedimentation that has accrued around verbal concepts usually taken for granted - above all, that of the "human" itself. "The human-that-we-are is the product of a long process of domestication," he writes. Working with children and adolescents without easy or transparent access to verbal speech requires the momentary suspension of interpretation, so that something else - the flicker of a gesture, "the remainder, resistant to any comprehension" - might begin to come in to focus.

Abandoning the politically charged atmosphere of La Borde for the desolate Cévennes region, Deligny and his colleagues continued their singular pursuit of "the network as a mode of being" - one that would be far less concerned with interpreting behavior and experience according to the hidden intentions and secret desires of individual human subjects, and more focused on "tracing" the trajectories, detours, and wander lines that compose a given social milieu. It was here that Deligny consummated his longstanding preoccupation with mapping the gestures, movements, and trajectories of the autistics living within his networks. He first experimented with cartographic tracing in the late-1960s in collaboration with a young militant filmmaker, Jacques Lin, who joined the group's small desert encampment. Deligny, Lin, and their collaborators began to follow their autistic counterparts as they made their way through the Cévennes's rocky terrain, making rudimentary line drawings to indicate their direction of movement across the rural encampment and into surrounding wilderness.

Image: Archives Jacques Allaire and Marie-Dominique Guibal
Reproduction: Anaïs Masson
Republished courtesy of Univocal Publishing
The tracings soon became a central aspect of the group's activities, and the maps grew steadily more detailed and elaborate. They developed visual systems for designating the various sounds and gestures encountered along their pathways, and started to use transparent wax paper to trace the children's daily routes. No attempt was made to interfere with their movements, or to explain or interpret them. The focus remained on the process of tracing itself. Yet distinct patterns began to emerge: certain trajectories tended to be repeated from one day to the next, and Deligny noted that some of the wandering lines seem to correspond to the conduits of underground waterways.

In his writings, he calls these cartographic trajectories lignes d'erre. This phrase might be translated as "wander lines," "errant lines," or "lines of drift" (Burk and Porter tend to go with the first option). The concept of the wander line is the most significant and original contribution of Deligny's thought: it condenses, in a single stroke, his lifelong pursuit of "draining off stagnant humanisms" by unsettling the primacy of speech. He undertook the process of mapping the lines "in order to make something other than a sign." Before phrases, words, and letters can form, there must first be lines. Tracing the quotidian trajectories of his autistic collaborators, it seems, was an attempt to return to writing's origins, before it became codified or standardized, and when it still resembled the outlines of things encountered in moving through the world.

There is another word that Deligny often uses in relationship to mapping the wander lines: vaguer, a verb that shares a root with the French noun for "wave." (Burk and Porter alternate between translating this word as "wandering" and "drifting.") Like the French word vague, drift carries with it a sense of the movement of water, as in drifting down a river (a figuration that also recalls Deligny's comparison of his group's provisional encampments to rafts afloat on a sea of language). Indeed, Deligny's language continuously evokes a kind of bodily letting go - an attenuation of subjective agency and conscious intentionality, as when one surrenders to a powerful ocean current. This quality is central to what Deligny is trying to evoke with the lignes d'erre, which seem to register an epistemological slackening of the distinction between the human subject and the nonhuman forces it encounters in a given environment. "The fact that drifting has no predefined object can make one think that the subject, then, is adrift," he writes. He insists that this is a profound error of attribution, with dire consequences: the notion of the language-grounded human subject - and what he calls its "thought-out-project" - has been a regulative norm that conditions one's access to social existence. In place of depth-based models of human subjectivity, Deligny offers cartographic surfaces and the hand-drawn lines.

The Arachnean and Other Texts includes photographs of the residents of Deligny's rural encampment, taken in the summer of 1969, as well as over a dozen black-and-white reproductions of a selection of the wander-line maps, dating from the late 1970s. A few include detailed captions describing the trajectories and symbols of the various lines - one, from 1976, indicates not only the trajectory of a particular child, Ann, and an adult, Jean Lin, who traced her movements, but also shows the places where they encountered a flock of sheep (and heard the ringing of sheep bells) and stopped to cut wood for the encampment. Others are less detailed but more graphically arresting: the lines loop and tangle to form distinctive shapes, hinting at habits of movement and direction that become visible over days, weeks, and months of tracing.

Starting in the early 1960s, Deligny and his group began filming the daily activities of their encampments; it is especially illuminating to consider The Arachnean and Other Texts alongside Deligny's cinematic work (a three-disk DVD set of his films was released in France in 2007). Deligny's interest in the pedagogical uses of film can be traced to his early friendship with André Bazin and Chris Marker. (In the years following the war, all three worked at Travail et Culture, an organization affiliated with the French Communist Party whose mission was to offer educational and cultural activities for proletarian factory workers; it soon became an intellectual and cultural incubator for the postwar French Left.) Under their influence, and in line with emerging ideas about the political potentials of renegade or amateur filmmaking and the rise of the "Third Cinema" movement, Deligny believed that the tools of filmmaking could be especially liberating for young people for whom the conventions of written or spoken language functioned as an impediment to social integration.

Through his friendship with Bazin, Deligny also formed an important connection with the young François Truffaut. The two consulted as Truffaut was in the process of making his 1959 debut feature, Les 400 coups ( The 400 Blows). According to their correspondence, Deligny was especially influential upon Truffaut's construction of the film's iconic final sequence, in which Truffaut's protagonist and autobiographical counterpart Antoine Doinel escapes from the rural institution for social delinquents where he has been confined, and is shown running across the countryside into the churning waves of the ocean.

If the New Wave filmmakers that Bazin helped to foster approached cinema as its own expressive language, Deligny and his collaborators viewed it a powerful alternative method for registering the gestures, wanderings, and other repertoires of bodily movement that unfurled beyond the reach of semantic coding and language-based systems of interpretation. A feature-length, quasi-narrative film created out of this footage was shown to acclaim (and considerable bafflement) at the Cannes Film Festival in 1971, under the title Le moindre geste - The Slightest Gesture. Transposed into a cinematic idiom, the wandering lines that Deligny traced along the transparent surface of hand-drawn maps become slow tracking shots of solitary figures wandering through barren landscapes and the ruined edifices of primordial structures. The film stages a refusal of the psychological conventions of cinematic identification, and what Deleuze and Guattari termed the "archeological conception of psychoanalysis," with its reliance on the interior, hidden depth of the unconscious. In The Smallest Gesture, the wandering line becomes akin to a reel of film, linking Deligny's cartographic practice to the possibility of escaping from the disciplinary regulation of the body within institutions, clinics, and asylums.

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In recent years, the radical critiques of psychiatry that emerged in tandem with the new social movements of the 1960s and '70s - which were so central to a range of feminist, gay liberation, and anti-colonial struggles that took shape in those decades - have largely faded from view, even as the reach of psychiatric power has become ever more pervasive and molecular in scope. Encountering Deligny's writing today reveals the richness and vitality of this critical heritage, and serves as a much-needed reminder of its ongoing relevance. In view of his stringent critiques of psychiatric authority's coercive and normative force, it is worth considering how Deligny's work might illuminate more contemporary struggles over the politics of mental health.
Leon Hilton is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University, where his work focuses on the intersections of disability studies, performance theory, and queer studies.
It is especially difficult not to read this new translation in light of current, widespread anxieties about the so-called global "autism epidemic," on the one hand, and, on the other, a growing body of work authored by autistics that has appeared in recent decades in tandem with the emergence of the neurodiversity movement starting in the 1990s. In an insightful essay published as this new translation's introduction, the philosopher Bertrand Ogilvie notes that Deligny was not concerned with determining the neurobiological origins autism - a question that he considered to be beyond his expertise, and that remains elusive for medical researchers even today. Deligny studiously avoided entering these debates, seeking instead to "reinscribe autistics within the circle of common life." Writing toward the kind of affirmative accounts of autism developed by proponents of neurodiversity, Ogilvie argues that Deligny understood "it is not on the side of autism that one finds wildness [ sauvagerie], but rather in civilization and in its most characteristic gestures."

Yet the essays collected in The Arachnean and Other Texts consistently attest to Deligny's profound uneasiness in affiliating with any stable or pre-existing political position. Ogilvie compares the paradoxical motivation that underlies all of Deligny's writing to a question posed, in a slightly different register, in the work of Georges Bataille: "How to form the project of exiting from all projects"? Or, as Deligny himself asks in a still-untranslated essay, how to imagine a mode of relation that would be "outside of function" - one that would not bear the traces of a desire to make autistics and others who live outside, or on the margins, of language conform to the shape of the "thought-out-project," the neurotypical subject, the human-that-we-are?

As this vital new translation reveals, Deligny pursued this question by working quietly, patiently, tenaciously over decades, to generate an utterly different sense of what it means to live life in common with others. "The common I speak of, resistant to the intrusion of language, neither communes nor communicates," he writes. Yet the new sense of the common that takes shape in Deligny's work is also as old as the Arachnean itself: "If our particular network, so flimsy and precarious, had a vocation," he writes, "it would be to weave at least some aspects of a primordial communism." The publication of The Arachnean and Other Texts shifts the tense of Deligny's primordial communism, and brings it hurtling into the present - or perhaps reveals it to have been here, spinning its shimmering web, all along.

¤

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Mapping the Wander Lines: The Quiet Revelations of Fernand Deligny

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FERNAND DELIGNY found many ways of describing himself: primordial communist, nonviolent guerrilla, weaver of networks, cartographer of wandering lines. A visionary but marginalized figure often associated with the alternative and anti-psychiatry movements that emerged in the decades after World War II, Deligny (1913-1996) remains difficult to categorize - an enigmatic sage.

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Lola smelling fungi during sensory Downloading Woods workshop The Avenue Special School

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Lola smelling fungi during sensory Downloading Woods workshop The Avenue Special School

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These would have ectomycorrhizal fungi on them

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These would have ectomycorrhizal fungi on them

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Art students from across years explored a walk as material. We explored the woods on campus each of us carried an envelope as we walked we added finds, created small drawings and wrote down cues to connect us with other walkers and help us consider the idea of trees communicating through networks of fungi and roots beneath us.

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Please come purpleSTARS will be there tomorrow Friday 9th Sept.

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Please come purpleSTARS will be there tomorrow Friday 9th Sept.

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Air Bubs Project @ Greenwich and Dockland Festival (this weekend!)

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7.00mins 30secs Of Birds In The Ancient Woods by purpleSTARS

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About Mother Trees in the forest

Recognizing the importance of Mother Trees and the vast below ground network connecting all trees has added to our understanding of how forests work.

These connections have been known for a long time by Aboriginal peoples and the research of Dr. Simard and others has demonstrated scientifically that forests are deeply connected and collaborative places.

Trees are part of a large, interconnected community interacting with their own and other species, including forming kin relationships with their genetic relatives.

In mapping the fungal network, our research has shown that the biggest and oldest trees are the most connected nodes in the forest. These highly-connected hub trees, also known as Mother Trees, share their excess carbon and nitrogen through the mycorrhizal network with the understory seedlings, which can increase seedling survival. These Mother Trees in this way act as central hubs, communicating with the young seedlings around them. In a single forest, a Mother Tree can be connected to hundreds of other trees.

Our research has shown that kin seedlings receive more carbon from Mother Trees than stranger seedlings do. The Mother Tree sends carbon to other seedlings in the neighbourhood as well.

Additional research has shown that large hub trees (that we call Mother Trees) transmit carbon through the mycorrhizal network to young seedlings in need. The carbon moves along a source-sink gradient, where the larger tree is the source of carbon and the seedling is the sink.

Network model showing the linkages between Douglas-fir trees through the mycorrhizal network. The arrow points to the most highly connected tree. Diagram from Beiler et al. 2010.

Illustration: Talking Trees

Illustration from National Geographic magazine explaining how trees in a Douglas-fir forest use the mycorrhizal network to relay stress signals and share resources with one another.

Tree regeneration is more dependent on connections in drier climates

As forests become stressed (e.g., under hotter and drier climates), seedlings are more dependent on mycorrhizal networks for establishment and survival. In arid ecosystems, Mother Trees provide germinants with essential carbon, water and nutrients through mycorrhizal networks. In less stressed ecosystems, these exchanges still occur but the extra help is less crucial to survival because resources are naturally more abundant.

Forests where the natural connections between trees are maintained should help enhance regeneration, support biodiversity, and conserve carbon storage

Traditionally, forestry has treated trees as individuals and not as though they live in communities. However, the understanding that trees are linked below ground to their kin and extended community has the potential to influence the way we practice forestry.

The many hub trees and overlapping networks in a forest provides resilience - one or two hub trees can be removed without causing the network to collapse. The remaining hub trees within the network still allow for the flow of communication and the trading of resources. As a result, the death of one tree does not mean that the whole forest unravels, in the same way that a human community can sustain the loss of a community member without collapsing.

Our experiments have also shown that when forests are harvested, the retention of Mother Trees helps the forest regenerate. Seeds from the Mother Tree germinate nearby and quickly tap into the fungal web and receive resources that boost their chances of survival.

Other experiments have shown that connections between conifers and deciduous species like aspen and birch are important for mitigating disease and insect outbreaks. Protecting deciduous trees rather than removing them by cutting or spraying them with herbicides also makes forests more resistant to fire because the broadleaves hold more water, contain less resin, and are less flammable than conifers. Many other studies have shown that protecting old trees and a deciduous component helps maintain biodiversity of birds, animals, plants, fungi, and other organisms.

Additionally, experiments have shown that the retention of old trees and their extensive networks can reduce loss of carbon from the ecosystem-both above below-ground. The Mother Tree Project is testing how different retention levels of Mother Trees could protect existing carbon pools.

The Mother Tree Project is investigating how the connections between Mother Trees, seedlings and other plants enhance resilience of the forest community. Keeping communities of trees intact by maintaining the network of connections should help them resist the stress of climate change and recover more rapidly when climate-related disturbances do occur. In other words, connected forests are better able to cope with climate change and be productive, healthy and diverse and around for many generations to come.

Video: How Trees Secretly Talk to Each Other in the Forest

Video from National Geographic explaininghow trees in a Douglas-fir forest use the mycorrhizal network to relay stress signals and share resources with one another.

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About Mother Trees in the Forest - The Mother Tree Project

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About Mother Trees in the forest Recognizing the importance of Mother Trees and the vast below ground network connecting all trees has added to our understanding of how forests work. These connections have been known for a long time by Aboriginal peoples and the research of Dr. Simard and others has demonstrated scientifically that forests are deeply connected and collaborative places.

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Finally get to share my @EcossNau #Sciart that depicts the land carbon cycle for our new piece led by @AnthonyPWalker @ORNL et al in @NewPhyt : https://t.co/HYH1s48OWQ. Article comes to grips with the effect of elevated CO2 on the biosphere and pathways of C sequestration on land

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Finally get to share my @EcossNau #Sciart that depicts the land carbon cycle for our new piece led by @AnthonyPWalker @ORNL et al in @NewPhyt : https://t.co/HYH1s48OWQ. Article comes to grips with the effect of elevated CO2 on the biosphere and pathways of C sequestration on land https://t.co/nfAE7GBB1v

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Finally get to share my @EcossNau #Sciart that depicts the land carbon cycle for our new piece led by @AnthonyPWalker @ORNL et al in @NewPhyt : https://t.co/HYH1s48OWQ. Article comes to grips with the effect of elevated CO2 on the biosphere and pathways of C sequestration on land pic.twitter.com/nfAE7GBB1v
— Victor O. Leshyk (@victorleshyk) October 22, 2020

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Finally get to share my @EcossNau #Sciart that depicts the land carbon cycle for our new piece led by @AnthonyPWalker @ORNL et al in @NewPhyt : https://t.co/HYH1s48OWQ. Article comes to grips with the effect of elevated CO2 on the biosphere and pathways of C sequestration on land https://t.co/nfAE7GBB1v

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Finally get to share my @EcossNau #Sciart that depicts the land carbon cycle for our new piece led by @AnthonyPWalker @ORNL et al in @NewPhyt : https://t.co/HYH1s48OWQ. Article comes to grips with the effect of elevated CO2 on the biosphere and pathways of C sequestration on land https://t.co/nfAE7GBB1v

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Finally get to share my @EcossNau #Sciart that depicts the land carbon cycle for our new piece led by @AnthonyPWalker @ORNL et al in @NewPhyt : https://t.co/HYH1s48OWQ. Article comes to grips with the effect of elevated CO2 on the biosphere and pathways of C sequestration on land

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'Trees don't make mistakes they just keep on growing'

We were really excited to welcome representatives from The Abbey School in Reading, to the Art Department. A range of year groups joined us for an in depth and thoughtful session that explored climate change, tree communication, fungi and creative ways to tell forest and woodland stories. Here, they tell us what the visit meant to them:

On Friday the 27th June 2022, we visited Reading University and found out about a link between science and art. When we arrived in the morning, we found out about trees and the effects that have happened over the years due to global warming. We all found it shocking to see the graphs with data on it showing the increase in Carbon Dioxide over centuries. After the Industrial Revolution, there has been a huge increase in our CO2 emissions and we could see that on the graph as there was a big spike.

After that talk, we went outside to a small woodland area and investigated the trees. We did a variety of activities such as: mark making on paper against the trees, sketching different parts of the trees, taking lots of photos, and even listening to the sounds that trees make due to their different densities! It was very interesting finding out lots of facts about the trees. For example, I never knew how trees are all linked together under the soil by different types of spores. Overall, it was a very calming experience standing outside and embracing nature as I think we don't do it often enough. I very much enjoyed learning more about two of my favourite subjects and combining them together. - Chloe UIV

I really liked going to The University of Reading and looking at the trees and noticing things that we wouldn't usually notice whilst walking past one. I found mark-making very fun as we got to experiment with different media and looked at the lumps, bumps and imperfections of the trees. The scientist, Dr Tristan Quaife that we talked to was very interesting to listen to and we all learnt some interesting facts. For example England was once 80% forest! Mixing with other year groups was also enjoyable because I talked to people I wouldn't usually talk to. An interesting thing that one of the girls said was 'Trees don't make mistakes they just keep on growing' I also really enjoyed looking at the art gallery as there were pieces that nobody had seen- we were the first people to see them!

-Ria UIV

Going to Reading University was a very fun activity to do. I enjoyed how we got to hear a scientist's perspective on climate change and it made me realise how similar art and science are. It really helped me understand what is happening to the planet and how reading university are trying to change Reading. I really enjoyed doing the bark rubbings and i enjoyed making art out of the things I have found on the floor

One of my favourite parts was listening to the trees. What you had to do was put your ear on one side of the tree and hit the other side of the tree with a hammer and they all made different sounds somewhere loud and deep and others were higher and sounded more hollow. I also really liked the extra bit at the end when we walked around the exhibition there were all sorts of art my two favourite pieces were, the first one was the one where you had to walk through the tunnel into a painting and my second was one of plants. Esme year 7

I really enjoyed going to the university. I found it very relaxing to go outside and be able to get out of the classroom, and just do something different. I thought it was very interesting how two things I thought were very different (art and science) are actually quite similar. I loved learning about how science (and even other subjects, such as maths) can cross paths with art. I loved just being able to do whatever we want, and link it with the outdoors.

I liked mixing with other year groups, and getting to know the artistic community at our school more, whilst exploring the nature in the area outside the art studio at Reading University. I really loved that at the end we went to have a look at some of the work the students at the university had made, and found them all really fascinating. They were all very different, and I especially enjoyed it when we were standing inside a painting. There were all sorts of different styles and media used, which made it so exciting to look at. Overall, the experience was really fun, and hopefully, the art scholars can go on more school trips like these. Poppy, UIII

We visited Reading University with the art scholars. It was such a relaxing and refreshing experience, it was a chance to get outside and learn something new. I loved how there was an interesting contrast between art and science which was used very well. Studying the trees from the nearby forest and thinking about how we could help them speak. It was nice to look at them closely and sketch the detail. - Aria UIII

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Downloading the Woods - The Abbey School

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'Trees don't make mistakes they just keep on growing' Downloading the Woods - Field Kit - The Abbey School Sound Recording - Downloading the Woods We were really excited to welcome representatives from The Abbey School in Reading, to the Art Department. A range of year groups joined us for an in depth and thoughtful...

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We went hunting for unheard things that when we listened, we heard! Here are a few of them. Are you listening?

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I asked DALL-E 2 to create images based on "sounds in a woodland" and this was my favourite. I am not totally sure where the sounds fit, but it's a nice image.

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I asked DALL-E 2 to create images based on "sounds in a woodland" and this was my favourite. I am not totally sure where the sounds fit, but it's a nice image.

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purpleSTARS and Bubble Club Collaboration ideas for UNFURL

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purpleSTARS and Bubble Club Collaboration ideas for UNFURL

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Bubble Club and purpleSTARS collaboration for Air Bubs UNFURL this was to have taken place on 9th and 10th Sept 2022 as part of the https://festival.org/gdif/whats-on/unfurl/
The event was cancelled due to period of national mourning.

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The Abbey School Downloading the Woods

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Visualizing the Biomass of Life 🦊🦀🐬🦎🦃🐓🦩🦆🌳☘️🍄🌼🌍 #biomass #infographic #dataviz #datavisualization #EarthDay22 #earthday #sciart #life #illustration #art #science #data

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Visualizing the Biomass of Life 🦊🦀🐬🦎🦃🐓🦩🦆🌳☘️🍄🌼🌍 #biomass #infographic #dataviz #datavisualization #EarthDay22 #earthday #sciart #life #illustration #art #science #data https://t.co/D8nLMNk1LS

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Visualizing the Biomass of Life 🦊🦀🐬🦎🦃🐓🦩🦆🌳☘️🍄🌼🌍 #biomass #infographic #dataviz #datavisualization #EarthDay22 #earthday #sciart #life #illustration #art #science #data pic.twitter.com/D8nLMNk1LS
— mark belan - scientific illustrator (@markabelan) April 22, 2022

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Visualizing the Biomass of Life 🦊🦀🐬🦎🦃🐓🦩🦆🌳☘️🍄🌼🌍 #biomass #infographic #dataviz #datavisualization #EarthDay22 #earthday #sciart #life #illustration #art #science #data https://t.co/D8nLMNk1LS

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Visualizing the Biomass of Life 🦊🦀🐬🦎🦃🐓🦩🦆🌳☘️🍄🌼🌍 #biomass #infographic #dataviz #datavisualization #EarthDay22 #earthday #sciart #life #illustration #art #science #data https://t.co/D8nLMNk1LS

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Visualizing the Biomass of Life 🦊🦀🐬🦎🦃🐓🦩🦆🌳☘️🍄🌼🌍 #biomass #infographic #dataviz #datavisualization #EarthDay22 #earthday #sciart #life #illustration #art #science #data

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Richard Barnard - Hurt Not The Trees (Choir & Cello)

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The world can still hope to stave off the worst ravages of climate breakdown but only through a "now or never" dash to a low-carbon economy and society, scientists have said in what is in effect a final warning for governments on the climate.

Greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2025, and can be nearly halved this decade, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to give the world a chance of limiting future heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

The final cost of doing so will be minimal, amounting to just a few percent of global GDP by mid-century, though it will require a massive effort by governments, businesses and individuals.

But the chances were narrow and the world was failing to make the changes needed, the body of the world's leading climate scientists warned. Temperatures will soar to more than 3C, with catastrophic consequences, unless policies and actions are urgently strengthened.

Jim Skea, a professor at Imperial College London and co-chair of the working group behind the report, said: "It's now or never, if we want to limit global warming to 1.5C. Without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, it will be impossible."

The report on Monday was the third and final section of the IPCC's latest comprehensive review of climate science, drawing on the work of thousands of scientists. IPCC reports take about seven years to compile, making this potentially the last warning before the world is set irrevocably on a path to climate breakdown.

Though the report found it was now "almost inevitable" that temperatures would rise above 1.5C - the level above which many of the effects of climate breakdown will become irreversible - the IPCC said it could be possible to bring them back down below the critical level by the end of this century. But doing so could require technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which campaigners warned were unproven and could not be a substitute for deep emissions cuts now.

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said some governments and businesses were "lying" in claiming to be on track for 1.5C. In a strongly worded rebuke, he warned: "Some government and business leaders are saying one thing - but doing another. Simply put, they are lying. And the results will be catastrophic."

Soaring energy prices and the war in Ukraine have prompted governments to rethink their energy policies. Many countries - including the US, the UK and the EU - are considering ramping up fossil fuels as part of their response, but the IPCC report made clear that increasing fossil fuels would put the 1.5C target beyond reach.

Guterres said: "Inflation is rising, and the war in Ukraine is causing food and energy prices to skyrocket. But increasing fossil fuel production will only make matters worse."

John Kerry, the US special presidential envoy for climate, called the report "a defining moment for our planet" and warned governments must move faster. "The report tells us that we are currently falling short in our battle to avoid the worst consequences of the climate crisis and mobilise the urgent global action needed. But importantly, the report also tells us we have the tools we need to reach our goals, cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, reach net zero by 2050, and secure a healthier, cleaner planet," he said.

The IPCC working group 3 report found:

Coal must be effectively phased out if the world is to stay within 1.5C, and currently planned new fossil fuel infrastructure would cause the world to exceed 1.5C.

Methane emissions must be reduced by a third.

Growing forests and preserving soils will be necessary, but tree-planting cannot do enough to compensate for continued emissions for fossil fuels.

Investment in the shift to a low-carbon world is about six times lower than it needs to be.

All sectors of the global economy, from energy and transport to buildings and food, must change dramatically and rapidly, and new technologies including hydrogen fuel and carbon capture and storage will be needed.

Pete Smith, a professor of soils and global change at Aberdeen University, said: "The time of reckoning is now. We have one decade to get on track. We use fossil fuels in all these things that we need to change."

Poor countries warned they were ill-equipped to make the changes needed and required financial assistance from richer nations to cut emissions and help them adapt to the impacts of the climate crisis. Madeleine Diouf Sarr, the chair of the least developed countries group at the UN climate talks, said: "There can be no new fossil fuel infrastructure. The emissions from existing and planned infrastructure alone are higher than scenarios consistent with limiting warming to 1.5C with no or limited overshoot. We cannot afford to lock in the use of fossil fuels."

Catherine Mitchell, a professor emerita of energy policy at Exeter University, said the needs of the poorest countries must be prioritised. "Unless we have social justice, there are not going to be more accelerated greenhouse gas reductions. These issues are tied together."

Publication of the report was delayed by a few hours as governments wrangled with scientists in marathon sessions, culminating late on Sunday night, over the final messages in the 63-page summary for policymakers. While IPCC reports are led by scientists, governments have input on the final messages in the summary for policymakers.

The Guardian understands that governments including India, Saudi Arabia and China questioned messages including on financing emissions reductions in the developing world and phasing out fossil fuels. However, scientists stressed that the final summary was agreed by all 195 governments.

This was the third instalment of the IPCC's sixth assessment report, covering ways of reducing emissions. It follows a first section published last August that warned human changes to the climate were becoming irreversible; and a second section published at the end of February warning of catastrophic impacts.

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IPCC report: 'now or never' if world is to stave off climate disaster

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The world can still hope to stave off the worst ravages of climate breakdown but only through a "now or never" dash to a low-carbon economy and society, scientists have said in what is in effect a final warning for governments on the climate.

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So what is a lichen, anyhow? Good question.

To most lichenologists - the people who study lichens - lichens are essentially the outward face of an enduring partnership between two or more unrelated organisms: a fungus on the one hand, and algae or cyanobacteria (or both) on the other.

At least that's the way the story's usually told; though as we take pains to describe in Ways of Enlichenment - the upcoming books this website was created to amplify - lichens can be thought about from several other perspectives as well. To name a few: lichens are fungal greenhouses; lichens are algal farmsteads; lichens are ecosystems; lichens are organisms; lichens are emergent property.

The body of a lichen is called a thallus. The greater part of most (but not all) lichen thalli consists of fungi: Earth's first weavers. Viewed close up, fungi consist of hyphae: tiny white "threads" - inverted thread-like intestines might be a better description - that grow by absorbing nutrients from their immediate environment. The hyphae of unlichenized fungi weave a kind of living internet within their host, be it soil, logs, dead fish, or humans (e.g., ringworm). In some ecosystems fungal hyphae function as miniature straws, passing nutrients around not only within the fungus itself, but also from one species of tree, say, to another. Think of them as the "lines of communication" that hold certain ecosystem together, make it work.

A key feature of the lichen thallus, as of the internet, is that it operates without a centralized intelligence, a command centre, a headquarters, a head. Instead, lichens engage in what could be called network thinking which, when you think about it, is the original lateral thinking. And that's precisely what we'd like this website to be, or at any rate to become: a place for lateral thinking. We envision a place where people with different backgrounds, perspectives and skill sets can work together - using lichens as a kind of model system - to develop a deepening understanding of the natural world and, thereby, of ourselves. Ways of enlichenment.

Admittedly these are still early days for our website. Even so, there's already plenty here to occupy you awhile, maybe challenge some old ideas. Do be welcome.

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So what is a lichen, anyhow? Good question. To most lichenologists - the people who study lichens - lichens are essentially the outward face of an enduring partnership between two or more unrelated organisms: a fungus on the one hand, and algae or cyanobacteria (or both) on the other.

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English folk song the trees they do grow high

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English folk song the trees they do grow high

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The Trees They Do Grow High

The British Library Board acknowledges the intellectual property rights of those named as contributors to this recording and the rights of those not identified.
Legal and ethical usage "

Recording locations

England

Performers

Broadwood, Lucy Ethelred,|b1858-1929 (singer, female)

Recordist

Broadwood, Lucy Etheldred

Description

EFDSS Cylinder No.21. The Trees the do grow high, probably sung by Lucy Broadwood, with piano accompaniment. The English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS) Collection divides into three sub-collections of Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, and English recordings. The original cylinders still belong to the EFDSS, originally stored in Cecil Sharp House. The Scottish Gaelic recordings were made by Lucy Etheldred Broadwood (1858-1929) the great grand-daughter of John Broadwood the harpsichord and piano manufacturer, and by Dr. Farquhar MacRae. These recordings are mainly from 1908 and are very good quality. The Welsh recordings were made by luminaries of the Welsh Folk-Song Society such as Lady Ruth Herbert Lewis (1872-1946), and the singer Mary Davies (1855-1930). These are of rather poor sound quality. Also in this part of the collection are demonstrations of animal and sheep dog calls. The English Collection is a mixture of good, reasonable and poor sound quality, made by Cecil Sharp (1859-1924), Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), George Butterworth (1885-1916) and the folklorist Ella Mary Leather (1876-1928), among others. These recordings are also of great interest in that the tunes were to influence, and be used in compositions by Vaughan Williams, Butterworth, and Holst.

Metadata record:
View full metadata for this item

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EFDSS Cylinder No.21. The Trees the do grow high, probably sung by Lucy Broadwood, with piano accompaniment. The English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS) Collection divides into three sub-collections of Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, and English recordings. The original cylinders still belong to the EFDSS, originally stored in Cecil Sharp House.

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We assume that leaves are perfectly randomly distributed in space (audio file)

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We assume that leaves are perfectly randomly distributed in space (audio file)

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These would have ectomycorrhizal fungi on them (audio file)

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These would have ectomycorrhizal fungi on them (audio file)

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The sound of mushrooms, music from fungi, by Michael Allen Z Prime

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We assume that leaves are perfectly randomly distributed in space

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We assume that leaves are perfectly randomly distributed in space

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Hz #15 -“Of Ultrasound, Art and Science”

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An audio realisation of the vertical wind fluctuations.

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Audio realisation of data from a sonic anemometer used to measure CO2 fluxes in forests

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This time, a stereo track of the horizontal wind components.

https://soundcloud.com/user-635186881/sonic-anemometer-xy-components?si=09c6cf1dd4c84138b20ffb3dfa01e47e&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

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Sonic Anemometer XY Components by Tristan

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Audio realisation of data from a sonic anemometer used to measure CO2 fluxes in forests. This example is stereo data generated from horizontal wind speeds.

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You can see the dried up tips of Ectomicrorisal

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Canopy Light Flecks Western Hemlock & Planes

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Google earth image of Thames Valley Science Park

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1 minute of sounds from my living room is Wokingham

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1 minute of sounds from my living room is Wokingham

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Conversation
Footsteps
Creaking floorboards
Boiler running

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1 minute of sounds from my room in London

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1 minute of sounds from my room in London

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Police car siren

Music from next door

Car

Shout

Plane

Wind

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The Mobile ArtLab - ArtLab Everywhere!

The Mobile ArtLab
The Mobile ArtLab is a very flexible starting point, prefacing a longer learning journey for our young people. It doesn't tell them what direction to head off in, and it does not instruct them what to look at along the way. It may, however in the same way that a giant pointing hand on a theme park map can, help to orientate young people, highlighting and identifying further and higher education opportunities.

What is it?
The Mobile ArtLab is a self contained portable workspace, delivered in a trailer by an interdisciplinary team of students and staff. It is a site specific, sharable working model of our delivery approach for Widening Participation.

The main outcome from this strand of our research is that situation/place is important, if not crucial to facilitate meaningful engagement in Widening Participation activities. Traditional learning spaces will attract students who are comfortable in them, but not the young people who are hard to reach and who are a key focus for our WP.

On sIte and ready to go!

Where can the Mobile ArtLab go?
As a research unit, the Mobile ArtLab is perfectly placed to develop a test bed for WP approaches through art and technology, Encouraging our young people, increasing life chances and future careers, which in turn are all our futures.

There is still an overwhelmingly pressing need for academia to engage with our young people. We must continue to collaborate, to co-construct and to connect meaningfully through our creative projects.

The Mobile ArtLab is another research area that we can offer to link with even more potential partners (both academically and with other providers such as industry, health and social provision).

It is these types of partnerships that will enable us to take our research, our actions and interventions into greater environments such as health, education policy change, teacher training and to collaborate with the technology providers themselves.

Jon Lockhart - Phd Candidate - ArtLab

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The Mobile ArtLab - ArtLab Everywhere! The Mobile ArtLab The Mobile ArtLab is a very flexible starting point, prefacing a longer learning journey for our young people. It doesn't tell them what direction to head off in, and it does not instruct them what to look at along the way.

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The University of Reading is a global university that enjoys a world-class reputation for teaching, research and enterprise.

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1 minute of sounds from my cottage in West Berkshire

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1 minute of sounds from my cottage in West Berkshire

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Cuckoo clock ticking
Birdsong
Next door switching on their light switch

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The University of Reading is a global university that enjoys a world-class reputation for teaching, research and enterprise.

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AUDIO DESCRIPTION VR Four Seasons Forest Experience for the Museum of English Rural Life by purpleSTARS

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Bringing together artists and technologists with and without learning difficulties/disabilities to transform museum experiences and make them really inclusive. We use sensory and digital media to create alternative interpretations of museum collections.
We have created a VR experience for the Museum Of English Rural Life(MERL) this is an audio description of the seasons and the forest.
Find out more https://purplestars.org.uk/2017/03/01/featured-content-2/

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Downloading the Woods

This project will engage local stakeholders around ideas of woodland planting, its role as a tool for mitigating climate change, how this changes the sense of place in the location that is planted, and how this will evolve in time. In this short project we will focus on a single aspect of how woodland users experience these spaces: through sound.

Woodlands have a unique place in the British psyche, and we experience these spaces through all of our senses, but none more so than sound. Trees help to deaden noises from outside the woodland, creating a close and intimate space, but also generate their own sounds as the wind blows through them. Animals that use the woodland also make their own distinctive noises, such as bird calls or the passage of mammals through the undergrowth. The species of tree and the local climate influence these soundscapes: they determine the habitat for different species of fauna and influence the strength of the wind. In addition, we are increasingly using sound to make scientific measurements and so it has also become a quantitative tool to help us understand the ecosystem services provided by woodlands.

This project builds upon the Eco Valley woodland research project which is supported by scientific equipment funded by the University of Reading (UoR) and staff time by the University of Reading Research Endowment Trust Fund (RETF). In addition, we have recently won a grant from the Woodland Trust which will equip areas of existing woodland on the TVSP site with instruments that measure biodiversity using sound recordings. The equipment purchased by TVSP which quantifies the uptake of carbon does so in part by using sound signals at ultrasonic frequencies too. We will also purchase novel “tree-talk” sensors which listen to the internal sounds of trees to determine the rate of sap flow.

Downloading the Woods will compile examples of the different sources of audio we are using, from the TVSP site and other woodlands, and generate new recordings using contact microphones placed in the existing woodlands on the TVSP campus (St John’s Copse and New Calvert). We will create a web-based platform to allow people to explore these sound recordings and provide information on science behind the recordings and how they relate to biodiversity and climate change. Via this platform users will also be able to access more traditional information about climate mitigation via tree planting, climate scenarios for the south of England and the challenges around preserving and enhancing biodiversity.

This short project will act as a catalyst for future research, building awareness of TVSP plans for the existing and future woodland at the site and the science of ‘mitigating climate change’. We will use sensory art and technology to connect participants to their environment and raise awareness of the complex balance of tree planting for carbon capture and biodiversity. We will work together as co-researchers inviting participation from The MERL Youth Panel, members of the community action plan team at TVSP, climate scientists and Reading School of Art students, in creating experimental artworks with a focus on listening and sounds. Participants will be invited to explore sounds of trees, past, present, and future and engage in the creative translation of scientific data including ultrasonic frequencies used to measure carbon capture and biodiversity. We will listen to the sounds of TVSP’s existing woodland, record and create visualisations of sounds, imagine and create the soundscapes of future forests and using participants mobile devices, upload artworks to an online 360 wood.

We will hold a celebration event in March at the site where (depending on COVID restrictions) guests will be invited to TVSP’s woodland to listen to the sound artworks installed in and around the trees or participate in an online event and a Podcast. This will include discussions with scientists and artists and allow attendees to build their own imagined soundscapes of future forests as participatory art project. This event, the establishment of a team of co-researchers and the resulting sound art works in the 360 online wood will be important outputs from the project.

4. Relevant expertise and skills of those involved (PI and all others involved, 1⁄2 page max.):

Tristan Quaife is an expert on the interaction of trees and climate. He leads the RETF project that is establishing monitoring of the carbon uptake by the new Eco Valley woodland using micro-meteorological techniques. He has a strong track record of cross-disciplinary work having held joint funding with colleagues from geography, environmental sciences, biology, agriculture and typography.

Kate Allen is an expert in inclusive practice-based research with extensive experience in community/participatory art projects, and public engagement. She is PI of the AHRC Sensory Objects Research project and the subsequent Follow-on Fund for Impact and Engagement enterprise, purpleSTARS www.purplestars.org.uk working in collaboration with people with learning difficulties and disabilities employing sensory art and technology to make museums more inclusive.

Brian Pickles is an expert in biodiversity and is the PI on a Woodlands Trust funded project that will monitor biodiversity in Eco Valley using novel audio devices. He also has extensive expertise in many aspects of forest ecology, including plant-fungal symbioses such as mycorrhizas, which can form belowground networks that enable nutrient transfer and communication between trees.

University of Reading's ArtLab https://readingartlab.com/ PhD candidate Jon Lockhart has developed The Mobile ArtLab as part of his practice-based research. The Mobile ArtLab is a self-contained portable workspace, delivered in a trailer, a site specific working model of ArtLab's delivery approach for Widening Participation https://readingartlab.com/mobile-artlab/.

The University of Reading Commercial team have funded the purchase of some of the equipment being used to assess carbon uptake at the site. They also organise the TVSP community action plan though which we will engage the local community. The team will also host the final “celebration” event.

5. Potential to develop interdisciplinarity and promote discipline hopping to address environmental challenges ( 1⁄2 page max):

This project establishes a new collaboration within the University of Reading and will set the foundation for onward partnerships between the School of Art and science departments as part of the ongoing initiative to establish the Eco Valley woodland as research platform for the whole university. It will also act as pilot for cross-disciplinary research as a tool for communicating new ideas around climate change to the local community and developing experimental artworks. Connecting with The MERL youth panel working towards a Youth Manifesto, brings the potential to create a sustainable legacy for future participatory engagement.

Because this project is necessarily short, we have restricted our focus to sound and the visualisation of sound and will rely on existing sources of recordings to supplement those we will gather during the project. This then leaves a lot to be explored in future projects – both in terms of recording sounds as the Eco Valley woodland grows but also widening the scope to other areas of art practice, such as painting, sculpture or poetry. We have already discussed, for example, using augmented reality to allow users to explore what a future forest might look like in-situ.

A key aspect of the proposed project is its participatory, community engagement nature (led by Associate Professor Allen). This is something that is often not well accommodated in science projects and hence establishing this collaboration opens the door to enhance these activities by working alongside colleagues from different disciplines and has the potential to significantly enhance our impact in the local community.

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"Every tree produces a different composition," Traubeck told Michael Byrne when the project began in 2012. "Sometimes it's more obvious, sometime it's not. The effect can be examined best by comparing different types of trees-for example, a fir tree sounds a lot more minimalistic and has a very abstract rhythm compared to an ash tree, which is more full sounding and rhythmic and loud."

To Trauback, the project is less about gaining new insight into nature than it is about demonstrating that data comes in many forms-"everything is a database in some way," he said-and that there are many ways to experience it.

"The fact that data can be experienced by looking at its overall structure rather than its content is fascinating to me," he said. "Wood was the perfect material to demonstrate this, because the structure of the data is what actually makes the material in this case, and that you can see it with your bare eye."

Traubeck continues to create bizarre new sounds; in [a recent project](. http://vimeo.com/88980496), he loops two electric guitars through each other to achieve a nearly perfect resonance. The tree album, Years, featuring seven beautiful recordings from different Austrian trees, generated in Vienna in 2012, is now available digitally and will be released on vinyl, not wood, in August.

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The Beautiful Record Made from Tree Rings

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"Every tree produces a different composition," Traubeck told Michael Byrne when the project began in 2012. "Sometimes it's more obvious, sometime it's not. The effect can be examined best by comparing different types of trees-for example, a fir tree sounds a lot more minimalistic and has a very abstract rhythm compared to an ash tree, which is more full sounding and rhythmic and loud."

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Shaping the Land – why is the first of our new galleries all about trees? - The MERL

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Written by Guy Baxter, Archivist The first space that visitors to the new MERL galleries enter is deceptively simple. It contains one object (a timber carriage), one large picture (an oak tree) and one literary quotation. Thanks to the projected animation and immersive soundscape, visitors can also…