Come OneTree(s) TwoWheeling ....

This Friday, beginning noon and Sat all day we will be doing an exploratory ride around the OneTrees clones, to see how the trees are doing, speculate on why they look different, formulate research questions, metrics, interesting ideas to investigate, and potential installations. We will be testing the blogservatories and mobblogging, so bring a handheld if you have one, or your laptop, or use the ones we will have with us.
The rough schedule is that we meet on Friday afternoon in the East Bay at noon and finish at San Francisco Art Institute on Friday evening. If you are up for urban camping you can stay out the night with us and listen to the city as most of the human presences quiet and the city is given to other less seen phenomena.
We will finish down south on Sat afternoon evening. We will have breaks/discussions every 2 hours, and the updated schedule will be here.

Recent Exhibition @ POND

Cloning has made it possible to Xerox copy organic life and 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 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 OneTrees project is a forum for public involvement in this debate, a shared experience with actual material consequences.

OneTrees, 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, and later as saplings at Exit Art in New York and at the Exploratorium, San Francisco. The exhibitions provided the opportunity to see the similarities and differences between the clones. Beginning Spring 2003 the clones have 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. POND are producing the project and coordinating the planting. Friends of the Urban Forest have also provided invaluable assistance.

Because the trees are genetically 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 material. However, there are also electronic components of the project which include Artificial Life (A-Life) trees that simulate the growth of the biological trees on your computer desktop. The growth rate of these simulated trees is controlled by a Carbon Dioxide meter(CO2 ). The project juxtaposes the simulated (A-Life) trees and their biological counterparts, demonstrating what simulation don't represent as much as what they do.

Each of the tree(s) can be compared by viewers in the public places they are planted, to become a long, quiet and persisting spectacle of the Bay Area's diverse environment.and a demonstration of a very different information environment.