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Tree Logic
This was a series of installations at University of California, Berkeley, one of which is shown. It's a parody of architectural symmetry. Gradually the tree's new growth adapts the gravitropic response -- new growth turns up, tries to grow up again. There are a couple of interesting asides that might become relevant -- this piece was also pulled down and destroyed by the stationary engineers at UC Berkeley because of something called 'tectonic anxiety.' Its actually unfortunate because there is a paper that's come out of this -- on the opposition of gravitropism and phototropism -- this phenomenon hadn't been documented. I wonder if Tree Logic was presented as a research project, if it would have been so hurriedly pulled down in the middle of the night, as it was as an art project.
I use these trees to gesture towards the growth responses of trees as information. The growth responses of trees is information, by another means, un-commodified information. The literacy to read these phenomena, like anything else, is culturally constructed. To be able to engage with these phenomena as information, rather than just recognizing packaging and databases as information, is set in relief to the imperatives of the information age. Translating these phenomena into representations that are commensurate with dominant rhetoric of contemporary culture is in contrast to the bucolic appeals to hug-a-tree strategies of environmentalism.
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