Edges and Ecocide
The Blued Trees Symphony, printed Geographic Information Systems mapping, colored pencil and gold leaf on paper. 18”x27” 2022
I recently had to write another gallery statement, this time for Various Small Fires Gallery Los Angeles. Each time I write these statements for a body of work, it helps me further clarify my own thinking about art and ecocide.
At Various Small Fires, I will be showing two works on paper created with Geographic Information Systems Mapping, colored pencil and gold leaf in addition to an acoustic environment in a corridor.
In the chaos of adaptation to climate change, I assert that identifying what I call, “trigger points,” small points in chaotic systems for aesthetic attention, can effectively address ecocide. In The Blued Trees Symphony, I defined a legal theory as a trigger point in an originalist definition of ownership between copyright and eminent domain law that would hold fossil fuel hegemonies liable for ecocide if they destroyed the artwork.
The music in the gallery corridor is a compositional fragment from 2015 of the first movement of The Blued Trees Symphony, a pragmatic and aesthetic solution to ecocide and habitat fragmentation. The score was composed of 1/3 mile long musical measures based on designating individual trees in a synesthetic aerial continental score based on a distribution of “tree-notes,” installed and copyrighted in North American forested landscapes where natural gas pipeline corridors were proposed. The goal was to create grounds to preemptively prosecute ecocide in international courts. In 2018 the legal theory won an injunction against a hypothetical corporation at the Cardoza School of Law https://cardozo.yu.edu/ in a mock trail produced by A Blade of Grass.
The corridor sound was produced electronically by transposing topographic aerial landscape features in the proposed corridors for natural gas pipelines as though the designated corridors were blank musical lines and organized around a simple iterated melodic theme. The theme was an iterated aerial score for tree-notes based on where the tree-notes could impede the movement of heavy machinery that would destroy a forest. The compositional software was musescore. The recordings have all been played in enclosed spaces, recapitulating the implications of an enclosed corridor in the natural landscape for gaslines.
The two mapping paperworks are mnemonic artifacts, indicating probable sea level rise, and identifying some sites of The Blued Trees Symphony. Habitat transitions are indicated in colored pencil. Gold leaf indicates where human population density might be sustained if habitat is preserved.
The Blued Trees Symphony portrays the whole Earth as a score in which the Blued Trees are compositional climaxes across latitudes to trigger the restoration of forested habitat contiguity in both fresh and sea waters. Requiem for Dying Trees and Dead Horses, references the death of our forests and other species. In Inner Mongolia, rare mineral extractions for global electronic consumption starves the steppes of water for the Horse Tribes. Horses can no longer find enough summer grass to survive harsh winters.
According to several agencies, including Global Witness and Earth League International https://earthleagueinternational.org/, as presented for a side event to the United Nations in 2022, ecocide and the fragmentation it causes is the 4th largest source of global revenue, an organized criminal enterprise with symbiotic relationships between elites and authoritarian governments that exacerbate the consequences of climate change. One remedy is accountability for ecocide. The Blued Trees Symphony is a proposal for human survival. It is one more answer to a question that demands many answers.