Drunken Text Messages From An Oak Tree documents a series of drunken text message conversations between an oak tree and Virginia Woolf's "Orlando," presented as a cell phone video, the text modified from an original passage of Woolf's.
Full Description
Drunken Text Messages From An Oak Tree documents a series of drunken text message conversations between an oak tree and Virginia Woolf's "Orlando," presented as a cell phone video, the text modified from an original passage of Woolf's.
Work metadata
- Year Created: 2012
- Submitted to ArtBase: Sunday Oct 5th, 2014
- Original Url: http://lindseyfrench.com/doc/drunkenTexts.html
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Work Credits:
- lindseyfrench, primary creator
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Artist Statement
Motivated by respectful collaboration with the natural world, I draw on personal experiences with agriculture, ecological activism, and landscape studies. I see plants not as mere landscape but as individuals, the allure of technology as a social reality, and I am drawn to the contradiction when contextualized with ideas of nature. I delight in discoveries where tensions between humanity and the natural world are reconciled. Where are the slippages between nature and technology? How can the landscape accommodate both realities?
Driven by research, my work is a process of open inquiry. I work through ideas materially or performatively, creating ecosystems of interrelated projects. I choose my materials meticulously, with a concern for the embedded history. Live plants, wood, paper and text form tentative relationships that are strengthened when performed, printed, engraved, and sonified.
My recent work uses technological mediation to search for new forms of communication with the natural world. Aided by electronic sensors and algorithms, I engage with individual organisms through processes of signaling, listening, and interpreting. The work materializes as texts written in collaboration with trees, video performances of attempted dialogues with the landscape, and sound installations of distant and displaced forests. Attempting impossible conversations, I seek not necessarily coherent communication, but the discoveries that unfold from these gestures of exchange.