Live Performance

Bristlecone pine tree, sound sculpture (welded brass instruments and objects), cello bow

Site-responsive sound performance in southern California. Experimental lutherie tunes our ears to the deep past and the uncertain present.

The performance experiments with listening to a many-thousand year old tree—as well as its interactions with the sound sculpture and with its surrounding environment—on a more-than-human timescale.

Bristlecone pine trees are sites for researching sonic and material decay. The resonance of a bristlecone pine—activated by a sound sculpture and cello bow—speaks to the ways that long time have acted upon a living organism. When we hear the vibrations of the pine tree’s fibers being activated by a sound sculpture, we are listening to the tree’s acoustical anatomy as well as its life history. We are hearing the resonance of centuries of climatic phenomena—culminating in the case of this particular individual with a series of rapid, climate change-exacerbated firestorm events—acting upon an organism. And we are hearing the sonification of an organism that has witnessed the coming and going of ice ages, the rise and collapse of empires.

The tree is a site for thinking about physical and acoustical architecture, sonic and material degeneration, shifting landscapes, resonance and vibration, multispecies relationships and sensory ecology, and entanglements among humans and more-than-humans. It is a place to think about local and global environmental phenomena and how they intertwine. It is a place to think about growth and decay, loss and renewal, kinship and wonder, climate grief and climate futurities, deep time and long time.

What does it mean to find new ways to listen, to pay attention, in these uncertain times? Can paying attention manifest as a kind of consciousness, a kind of political act?

The performance was temporary and did not involved touching the tree in any way. The performance left no trace on the tree or the environment.

2024