Make Like A Tree

digital moving image, work in progress

Make Like A Tree

...we travel through a vast, dark, empty space...we slowly approach a tiny, floating object, as we get closer, we recognize a homemade, paper stage with a photographic forested backdrop...our camera-eye surveils this space, and our expected watching is disrupted as our view moves around the back of this object to reveal another stage with the same forest backdrop, this time rendered by hand in pastel and paint...our camera comes to rest on a tree stump, zooms through a crevice which becomes a portal to deep space where human figures dressed as trees wear non-human masks and move in unison...

Make Like a Tree is meant to have multiple manifestations—the piece is at once cinematic and experiential, interactive and future-imagining. The video should screen on large public screens or in gallery installation and, simultaneously, on touch-screens allowing intimate, intuitive interface-exploration of 3D models embedded in the video. With additional community educational components, different forms of immersion embody the past (cinema/remembering) and present (screen based technologies/immediate experience) to construct a positivistic vision of our future. Key to the piece are 3D models of humans wearing custom printed/cut tree-ponchos and handmade masks representative of non-human creatures, organisms, and elements. Viewers are encouraged to consider the myriad ways symbiosis and mutualism must replace our current, disastrous, parasitic human-centered Anthropocene. This idea is called the Symbiocene, which ultimately must take center stage to allow a new era of acknowledging our deep interdependence and kinship with all non-human entities.