The Exhibition
The Clones
The Environment
The Context
The Trees
The Information
Additional Project Components
Cloning has made it possible to Xerox copy organic life and fundamentally confound the traditional understanding of individualism and authenticity. In the public sphere genetics is often reduced to 'finding the gene for .... (fill in the blank)', misrepresenting the complex interactions with environmental influences. The swelling cultural debate that contrasts genetic determinism and environmental influence has consequences for understanding our own agency in the world, be it predetermined by genetic inevitability or constructed by our actions and environment. The OneTree project is a forum for public involvement in this debate, a shared experience with actual material consequences.
OneTree, is actually one thousand tree(s), clones, micro-propagated in culture. The clones, were exhibited together as plantlets at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. This was the only time they were seen together. In the spring of 2001 the clones will be planted in public sites throughout the San Francisco Bay Area including: Golden Gate Park; 220 fronting property owners; SF School District Schools; BART stations; Yerba Beuna Performing Arts Center; Union Square and other sites. Friends of the Urban Forest will coordinate the planting.
Because the trees are biologically identical, in the subsequent years they will render the social and environmental differences to which they are exposed. The tree(s) slow and consistent growth will record the experiences and contingencies that each public site provides. They will become a networked instrument that maps the micro climates of the Bay Area, not connected via the Internet, but through their biological materiality.
Each of the tree(s) can be compared
by viewers in the public places they are planted, to become a demonstration,
a long, quiet and persisting spectacle of the Bay Area's diverse environment.
Paradox clones on exhibit as part of Ecotopias Yerba Buena Center for the Arts San Francisco, Nov. 14, 1998 to Jan 3, 1999 |
The artificial life component of the project consists of tree growth algorithms (L-systems) that will be distributed on the CD-ROM, MUTATE, with other software. The growth rate and branching patterns of the modeled trees are controlled by a CO2 sensor (distributed with the CD-ROM) at the serial port of the local computer, puncturing the separation between virtual/digital and the actual environment. The opportunity to contrast the idealized computer models of the algorithmic trees and actual complex growth phenomena are facilitated by the OneTree web site where the trees, biological and algorithmic, will be assembled in an impossible geography. |
summary of ONETREE project components:
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Paradox clones in vermiculite - summer 1998
