Conversation with the North

With the automatic response of a compass, global attention points North, where present day and future realities coalesce: the pending is also the now. The North is shifting. The magnetic North pulls, and a chain of micro-ecological events splices a conversation that took place in Athens with the sounds of a distant forest.

It was early summer, around noon. “Plants have a different sense of time,” Coti told his fellow researchers. This statement started a creative journey into scientific inquiry and a shared ambition to talk to nature.

In August the research team went on a scientific excursion into Kemihaara, in the Northern region of Finland. They joined national park director Sakari Kankaanpää and scientist Dr. Panu Oulasvirta on an endeavor to uncover what ecology can know and communicate, and how organisms retain knowledge and express wisdom. “Listening to the North” is a continuation of that journey.

What does the North sound like?

“Listening to the North” is, literally, a telecommunications portal into the North.

The mechanically “alive” installation links to Sodankylä SGO, a research station in the national forest of Northern Finland. A listening post transmits the North live in winter, broadcast over megaphone into the gallery space and echoed by the rustling of branches in the gallery.  A scientific display of trans-natural communications techniques, gleaned from interviews with trees and other nature specialists, informs viewers about the micro and macro trans-natural communications, from talking on the cellular level to addressing a forest.  What would you say to the North?  On the opposite side of the gallery from the listening post is the talking post, where participants can talk to the North.  A viewing portal shows the forest, as well as interactions by distance collaborators, so that viewers may observe how their communication is received. Along with the trans-natural communications stations, mechanized organic objects within the room respond to the distant patter of forest.  When the Northern forest makes a noise, a network of leaves, twigs and tree limbs in the gallery move in response.

“Did you know that these same trees go all the way to the Pacific Ocean?  The forest, if you think about it, is one big organism.”

I never thought about that.

“Shhh, listen.”

The moment is nature.
“I tell a story about a reindeer in a forest.  I was there just when the sun broke into the fog, light glittered its fare white skin.  It gazed at me as I gazed at him.  An albino infant reindeer.  And then as it appeared, it disappeared into the woods.  The vast woods of the arctic circle.  A rainbow. Forests, endless forest.”  /excerpt from an interview with a tree

“Forest enables me to better understand space, in terms of experience in time.  In terms of layers. Something that could easily be grasped – one layer after the other as you enter this space of vast layers,
where the ‘end’ isn’t seen.”

A duration in time becomes one single moment.

“Now, say something.”

---