Natalie Jeremijenko: from One Tree; courtesy the artist

In Natalie Jeremijenko's work, a tree is cloned and the screen sprouts lifeforms. Fran Dyson explains.

At the end of the millennium, as the heavens rain seas and computers resist the year 2000, we might notice that the internet has begun to sprout. Check any number of art/science sites in the emerging genre known as 'a-life' or 'telematic' art', and you'll find artists and researchers fastidiously planting and cultivating, creating and evolving plants and other lifeforms in digital ecosystems. Amidst these endeavors in digital fecundity Natalie Jeremijenko's One Tree project--exhibited throughout November 1998 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in the politically and ecologically oriented Ecotopia show--seems to be exemplary. Its main components--100 tree seedlings exhibited in the show and then planted in the San Francisco Bay, and virtual trees distributed via CD ROM and then 'grown' on local computers--satisfy key features of the genre. They allow comparisons to be made between biological and artificial life, they unite artistic and scientific practice, they create pathways between local, artistic communities and on-line, virtual 'communities', they have a presence both on the ground (literally) and in cyberspace.

Like other artworks of the genre, the biological and the virtual seem to run in parallel. The web site exhibits data collected on each of the specimens, and it houses the virtual seedlings that are grown algorithmically, while the biological trees are equipped to record aspects of their growth and development. However, unlike most a-life sites, the growth algorithms of the virtual trees are extremely slow, making the experience of virtual-tree tracking about as exciting as watching grass grow. It's a deliberate 'go slow'--Jeremijenko is hiding the growth-speed parameters in order both to install what she describes as "slow background events" within a system renowned for its preoccupation with the "fast, flash and instantaneous," and to draw attention to the slow rate of catastrophic events, such as climate change, that are ignored in the short-term, crisis-driven media.¹ In fact, the virtual trees are designed to grow as fast as the biological trees, which are all clones from a single native Californian black walnut hybrid. Like the algorithmic trees, they share the same genetic material--the same 'code', providing a case study for genetic determinists and a-lifers, who will probably expect them to develop identical features both amongst themselves and in comparison to the algorithmic tree.

The public, however, will probably not see the trees as clones, or as specimens of biological life against which artificial life can be compared, or even as part of an evolving, interactive artwork. As the trees merge with urban life, providing shade in summer, influencing real-estate prices, occasionally falling down, the public will notice other things--that the trees' proximity to overhead electric wires produces stunted limbs, or that adoption by a tree-loving local accelerates their growth. These variations, an example of what Jeremijenko calls "social and environmental diversity," complicate simplistic notions of genetic determinism that "urge us to see that particular environmental changes are genetic, to believe that it's all part of our evolution." They produce a knowledge that is both lived and embedded in the environment, that develops through tending experiential intuitions, internalizing common wisdom. Of course, science would call this kind of knowledge subjective, unprovable, interpretative and eminently ignorable. Despite attempts to incorporate aesthetic, cultural and even environmental perspectives in a-life and telematic projects, despite the fact that, as Edward Shanken points out, there appears to be little real difference between artistic and scientific practice in this field², simulating neat theories about life on a computer takes precedence over messing with the mundanity of dirt and real estate. For this reason Jeremijenko is careful to represent the project in scientific terms, describing it as "a biologically manipulated instrument that, when distributed, will be a document of environmental and social difference." As an instrument, it has that aspect of scientific discovery involved in measuring, monitoring, mapping and naming the world. As a document, it records the gathering of data and produces information. As a collection of distributed specimens it generates knowledge via the particular "tree literacies"--as Jeremijenko calls them--that the public develops through living with them year after year.

Occupying the prickly liminality of art that sounds like science is, however, more than just a defense against trivialisation by experts who embrace aesthetics but refuse its representational status. If you think there's something ludicrous about the idea of reading trees as if they were documents, then you might also ponder the inclination to equate the digital with the biological, the real with the virtual, the map with the territory or the gene with the meme. Close scrutiny of these substitutions reveals one of the main problems with artificial life: the circularity that results from confusing models or representations of 'life', developed from theories about life, with real, phenomenal life.³ As the biological trees develop over time, as they increase in complexity in response to both social and biological factors, they will offer much richer variations than their algorithmic counterparts. This divergence will demonstrate "the mythology that computers can actually model things well," that the documents, models and graphs they produce can adequately account for complex phenomena like climate change.

To emphasize this point, One Tree incorporates a third element--a program which prints tree- ring shapes every time the equivalent of one tree in paper has gone through the printer, 'growing' a pile that resembles a little stump. At the site of documentation then is the 'ecological disaster' that links the biological and the computational. Masses of paper flowing from a technology that, with all its immateriality, was supposed to deliver the paperless office. The printouts are a material documentation--the evidence--that is required by orthodox science. Collected, they stand as monuments to the demand for verifiability, representing the material outcome of a philosophy that views all phenomena as piles of data to be recorded, collected, monitored--and felled in the process. As One Tree progresses we might wonders how many stumps would verify that a tree is sick? Or for that matter, a human? The link between environmental degradation and illness is difficult to verify, quantify or even explain scientifically. The medical industry responds by fastidiously analyzing genetic material in search of some badly written code. It recommends gene splicing, neurological re-wiring, transplants and pharmaceutical suppressants for accumulated toxicity or existential panic. It invests in the inertia of omnipresence via cyborgian and telepresent technologies that are based, again, on the actuality and metaphor of code. By creating environments where the body hands over many of its functions to technological devices, often on the basis of the latter's ability to record, monitor and document each and every movement, the population is gradually disabled. Nothing beats digitalia, but the by-product is a waning musculature, arthritic fingers, strained eyes and threatened immune system, and the increasing disregard for all that exists in the non-silicon, non-screen-based world. Equipped with this logic, the body and its materiality begins to resemble a faulty machine: it gets sick, it ages and its demands for care distract from the teleology of mechanical transcendence.

In many ways, the irreducible difference, the interdependence and the aesthetic presence of the biological trees in One Tree both stand for us all and are all that stands between us and the single tree, the univocal branching structure, the solipsistic model edging us towards paralysis and/or extinction. As biological life recedes in the face of such negligence, we notice that the screen begins to sprout lifeforms and habitats for our postbiological, teleperceptual culture. Mirroring the stump thinking of its creators, forming a circuit that looks pre-determined and evolutionary, the supremacy of code over the territory of life seems inevitable, were it not for the heavens raining seas or the calendar year beginning with a '2' rather than '1'. Life cannot be reduced to a model, as One Tree suggests. After all, the trees, as Jeremijenko finally reveals, are cloned from a hybrid called 'paradox', "and the paradox are a particularly vigorous cross."

¹ Interview with author, Melbourne, July, 1998. All following citations are from this interview.

² Edward Shanken Life as we know it and/or life as it could be, Leonardo, Vol 31, #5, 1998, p. 384.

³ As Shanken comments, not only are their difference from scientific projects difficult to judge, but they reproduce the same kind of circularity and solipsism to which computer modeling is prone: "Take a biological theory or law L, model it on a computer, and lo and behold, behavior b resembling that of biological organisms described by law L emerges." Ibid., p.385.

Fran Dyson is a theorist and sound artist based in New South Wales, Australia.

Natalie Jeremijenko links: 1, 2, 3

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