wood wide web

never just a tree, 2020-21, video documentary, online

A series on the idea of networks, looking at the discovery of the "wood wide web", or how trees communicate with each other, and drawing this together with communities of people and digital networks online. Influenced directly and concequentially by the COVID-19 pandemic. This project was due to be carried out during a residency at Kielderhead Wildwood Project, Northumberland Wildlife Trust (UK), with Visual Arts in Rural Communities , but was postponed due to the pandemic restrictions on travel.

The first videos were made during social distancing, while research for the project continued (March-June 2020). The link between communication and isolation became part of the project.

Videos from the series Never Just a Tree can all be viewed on the series Vimeo channel hosted by VARC.

The title of the series is taken from a personal communication with Professor Lynne Boddy, Biosciences, Cardiff University. She was explaining that we need to look at trees in the context of all of their surrounding environment, not just as standalone objects.

the power of inconspicuous things, 2021, Raspberry Pi, side-glow fibre-optic cable, LED lights, plastic, wood, acrylic and oil on canvas, video monitor, live stream, 160 x 90 x 90cm

An interactive installation. Six people in groups are invited to enter a pitch dark room. They can explore the space, including some paintings, using tubes of light that are handed to them on the way in. If they give up their light, they create streams of “mycorrhizal” fibre optics, creating light for others by sacrificing their own. The work is about networks: human, forest and digital.

Photo here by Colin Davison, taken at VARC for the ENTWINED exhibition.

macalla, 2021, interactive online, photography, dimensions variable

A triptych of web-based artworks about trees, growth, hope, community and collaboration. These are linked in the images below. All of the photographs have been taken on-site at Kielderhead Wildwood Project, Kielder, UK during residency in April 2021.

Visit the online artwork at this link.

The protective tubes became a symbol during the residency of the human hand in this planting. While trees need a canopy to grow healthy, this is a small token that is offered to the trees by humans that are trying to do right by them, by way of protection.

What will the trees tell their future children and grandchildren? How will they explain what it was like to spend their first ten years inside a tube, never feeling the air, reaching up toward the sky?

'macalla' is the Irish Gaeilge word for 'echo', literally translated as 'child of a shout'.

the planting of varda wood, 2021, tree planting, documentation, dimensions unmeasureable

On May 4th 2021, Varda Wood, a stand of 20 birch trees, was planted with Kielderhead Wildwood Project. Joined by artist Catriona Gallagher and facilitated by Tash Hemsley and Graham Holyoak at Kielderhead Wildwood Project, we braved the wind, rain, hail, snow and sleet to plant the wood and named it in honour of the recently deceased filmmaker Agnes Varda, who brought us all together so often.

The planting was later documented in the ENTWINED project publication.

federated spaces, 2020, community engagement, interactive,

Part of the process in this project is trying to engage an alternate online community, outside of those represented by the mono-culture of centralised online platforms.

To this end, I contacted many activists and technologically-minded people, and here I document some of the interactions I had.

Note: The Fediverse is a collection of online, open source platforms for social interaction that operate outside the mainsteam platforms like Google or Facebook. Most of the platforms that I explore here are part of the Fediverse.

Note 2: I am absolutely not a supporter of technological utopia, but do believe that there are good ideas in technology, and want to explore these toward a better, and more mutually connected future. This includes ad-hoc, community led networks, and online platforms for sharing and information.

Socratic Dialogue, Mastodon

Using the online platform Mastodon, I carried out a Socratic Dialogue about the strengths and weaknesses of peer-controlled social networks.

The following link shows the full conversation, including a range of participants from different backgrounds: view here.

The Socratic Dialogue asked the question: "How to avoid an echo chamber...Is there a danger of exclusivity?", referring to the peer-controlled networks of the Fediverse.

The answers spawned the following list of results from the continued questioning:

• 1) Scale may be important: A smaller platform is potentially easier to manage
• 2) Rate of increase of scale is also important: If something scales too quickly then there might not be enough time for people to learn the etiquette and rules of a platform
• 3) Moderation is key. Moderators weed out debate that does not follow the rules or etiquette, and people self-regulate their streams
• 4) Distribution of power is a factor (linked to moderation) that allows for this self-regulation
• 5) One public sphere might not be enough – it might require many public spheres and many people interacting in different areas to create clear ideas
• 6) Online debate may provide a platform, but does not guarantee follow through. Real life interactions with people are needed to create positive social change

I built a blog on Pleroma, and a connected server, using Raspberry Pi and following this guide. This was put aside later, as I took too much on, but was an important step toward some future work in ad-hoc networks (see, for example, Assembly.

I have had profiles on Mastodon, PeerTube, Scuttlebutt and Diaspora; the latter has been active since 2013 but was recently retured (2022).

I work with open source technologies, including Raspberry Pi and Arduino, and use these throughout this project and others.