Public Art
When a tree falls, the sky falls is a temporary outdoor art event that deals with the ongoingness in nature: the action of trees falling, branches breaking, the duration in the material, temporality and weather patterns.
The project arises as a reaction to incidental events in park-like settings such as a fallen tree or branch, and the shift it makes in the ordering of nature. What happens when a tree falls? What are the consequences of movement and its future potential?
A town-wide event that uses private properties and utilizes the active transformation of our world as an event to choreograph new movements: new ways of seeing nature, activating the feeling of temporality and duration. It’s a town with many trees. Fallen branches are everywhere. It’s an ongoing activity that keeps on being re-organized, re-moved and self-started again. Weather phenomena help into this way of transformation. When a tree falls the sky falls is activating a phenomenological experience of the action of falling – using branches that are small and light – like air, like sky. By using light mirrored mylar material, a reflection of the sky shows up on the mylar, creating a sky to ground relationship. The material is moved by the wind, changed by the rain and snow, feeling light, like air, like sky.
A design proposal for Downtown Cranford Utility Box.
Topologies are map-like drawings, where through listening, I create new landscapes of my perception of sound’s properties like materiality, size, texture, direction. I map sounds in places like my backyard in Cranford, NJ, urban areas, the beach, parks ann other. The drawing I am proposing is made up of lines of sounds of my backyard: birds, cars, machines, people talking, airplanes; the lines have trajectories, location, point in time, they are triggers, places of arrival and departure – paths that are very similar to our way of life today.
The location of the box, an intersection in a downtown with multi-cultural restaurants and shops, is very close to where my work is coming from: a world where everything is relational, a complex evolving system: where bodies emerge and move in multiple directions, always in relation, creating pathways, networks, making one continuous event.
The sound drawings create a new way of listening, transforming the sound to a line, and from a line to a direction and to an event. The Utility Box can be called a Listening station, where the person passing by can stop and listen. This will be a great opportunity to not only show art but create an ongoing participatory event to encourage an acute perception of our environment. While this drawing is a drawing of my backyard, we can create a site specific drawing that is specific to the sounds around the utility box.
The design I proposed is made up of lines of sounds of my backyard: birds, cars, machines, people talking, airplanes; the lines have trajectories, location, point in time, they are triggers, places of arrival and departure