After reading the book on forests I decided to take a trip to Epping Forest to search for these “Ghosts” Found in these places of natural beauty, looking for what I can hear within the soundscape that represented the past and present of Epping Forest.
I took some equipment with me, Lom Geophon, Zoom H1N and TASCAM DR100 MKII
I then cycled all the way from south London to Epping Forest. Gear in hand, On route I went to Jez Riley French exhibition about soil and the sounds of roots.
The installation was a quadraphonic room with sounds from soil, and the inner sounds of plants. I saw there was a talk on Sunday happening and I emailed afterwards as it was sold out and managed to be able to purchase a ticket I asked nicely and said it would contribute towards my portfolio project.
Following this I finally reached the forest. I went to the NW part of the forest and discovered Grimston’s Oak, the oldest tree in the forest, estimated to be 350 years old. I approached it and laid my Geofon contact mic around the base and picked up the slow movement and creaking of the large tree. I also followed into the forest and recorded birdsong and small streams and rivers. Overall the search for the ghosts was prominent, I could hear how the soundscape has changed I suppose. There would have not been so much noise pollution. But as the rainforest book said, sometimes the ghosts are listening to what is still there, the balance between noise pollution and actual sounds of the wildlife is proof of the fight and co-dependency that exists. My windshield broke, the TASCAM DR100MKII also broke, I got super muddy, and I need hiking shoes it seems. I guess this was the universe telling me I need to prepare better for the next trip, which I’ve decided will be near the birling gap.
I need to get the setup correct and take the right equipment with me, park my bike not take it with me. I left with a few sounds and a further determination to research and see what I can do with my sounds.
So next steps are, to reflect on some more research, and plan the gear for the next trip. Go to Jez Riley French talk next Sunday.
So I ended up purchasing this book, as it reflected the idea presented within my dissertation very well. They gave further research into rainforests within Britain that I had no idea existed. I wanted to use this book as a bible or a guide to research these forests but I found even more exciting information. The concept of ghost woods, or searching for ghosts within these environments that once existed and still hold on for dear life. How can field recording preservation within an artistic context occur as a reflection within my portfolio work, and can these pieces of work position the listener to feel more inclined to love and save our ecological planet? Here are some quotes.
A temperate rainforest is a wood where it’s wet and mild enough for plants to grow on other plants. Temperate rainforest is actually rarer than the tropical variety: it covers just 1 per cent of the world’s surface.
I think it’s good to define what a temperate rainforest is, in contrast to a tropical rainforest and that they only cover 1% of the world’s surface, even more rare than a tropical rainforest!
Britain’s rainforests, in short, are truly the pinnacle of our country’s woodlands. Not only are they extraoridinary places to experience, providing a fest for the senes. They’re also treasure-troves of biodiversity, home to globally significant populations of rare species of lichens and mosses, birds and mammals. And the carbon that our rainforest trees are busily soaking up — not just in their trunks, but also via the epiphytic plants that festoon their branches — make them some of our best allies in the fight against the climate crisis.
I think people often forget that nature and ecological sites like these rainforests are actually a helping hand against climate change that we face, and they soak up massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Even at 1% coverage of the world they still go a long way to help our planet stay at its correct temperature.
Between the first earth day of 1970 and the rio earth summit of 1992, millions of people across the world rose up to demand action against air and water pollution, environmental destruction and the despoliation of the natural world.
I read about this during my dissertation research. Earth Day and the moon landing created this unified feeling within planet Earth Showing us for the first time all together. I think this contrasts the same argument towards the natural world that we exist with.
The first modern ‘tree huggers’ were the Chipko women of Uttar Pradesh in India, who chained themselves to trees to stop them being cut down.
I think it’s interesting to see this within the context of Western-sided research but in fact, the first tree huggers were the Chipko women of India!
This loss of cultural memo, this great forgetting that we once had rainforests, is almost as heartbreaking as the loss of the forests themselves, It points to the phenomenon that ecologists call ‘shifting baseline syndrome’: society’s ability to grow accustomed to environmental losses.
I didn’t realise that not only did we lose the forests in Britain but we also forgot. Which is even more important. How can our society forget they existed and dominated Britain at one point?
Britain’s rainforests remain under-recognised, unmapped, and largely unacknowledged by politicians and a wider public.
Something is also discovered while reading this book, it’s difficult to locate these forests and find them. I’m optimistic I can find out despite the rain that falls there.
The ecologist Ian Rotherham has joined the term ‘ghost woods’ to describe the landscape emptied of trees. As we now know, after the last Ice Age, Britain was far more wooded than the pitiful 13 per cent woodland cover we have today.
Ghost woods as a landscape emptied of trees is a super interesting concept to me. The idea is that they are still there the spirits of the trees, and that you can tell by the landscape that they existed.
Fowles wrote in an essay about Wistman’s wood, ‘thermal black hound is the Moor itself – that is, untamed nature, the inhuman hostility at the heart of such landscapes. But there is also something else haunting about Wistman’s wood and the barren moor that surrounds it – a nightmare that stalks the twenty-first century imagination far more than tales of ghost hounds and bogeymen. It is the spectre of ecological collapse. Forget the ghost stories: the real ghosts in Dartmoor’s landscape are the ones rising from the bones of the rainforests that we destroyed.
Ecological collapse is the real ghost that haunts Wistmans woods. How can we protect and understand these places on the edge of an ecological collapse?
But Rotherham’s search for ghost woods isn’t intended merely to mourn what’s departed, rather to resurrect what still survives
I think this is a key idea here, the ghosts are not what has gone but also what remains, what remains shows us what was there which is important.
If we have no love for nature, it seems unlikely that we’ll protect it. And without experiencing nature, regularly and close up, it’s hard to see how that love can be cultivated.
Very similar to what Gordon Hempton writes about that in order to save the planet we must make the population fall back in love with planet Earth.
How do we get people interested in rainforest plants, many of which are seldom seen by the general public? And, having got the public interested, how do we prevent people from loving our rainforests to death?
This contrast that falling in love with our forests like the Victorians did, which killed our fern population and also protected it, is a fine line. With more exposure comes more potential foot traffic and damage in these forests.
When you visit one of Britain’s magnificent rainforests, remember the essence of the Countryside code: take only photographs, leave only footprints.
Something I will follow when I take a trip to see them.
I also noted a few forest names within this book to think about the trip I want to take, to visit Wistmans wood.
RAINFORESTS:
Holn Chase 46
Wiseman’s Wood
The gizzard
Young Wood Lake District
Black tor beare
I also saw a map with a guide online on his website. I think the next steps are to continue research and also do experiments in other natural ecological sites before taking this big trip, perhaps they can all intertwine?
In this project, Katie bought a library of 100 trees in Norway. With the premise that in 2114 they will be cut down and made into books. Selected writers were chosen to join this book with a strict NDA to not share what they have written.
This book in chapter 3 is where I read this, I found it interesting as she describes this project as a way of understanding our passing time, nature and earth will live beyond humans.
“The idea to grow trees to print books arose for me through making a connection with tree rings to chapters, the material nature of paper, pulp and books, and imagining writer’s thoughts infusing themselves, ‘becoming’ the trees, over an expansive period of time. As if the trees absorb the writer’s words like air or water, and the tree rings become chapters, spaced out over the years to come.”
I think these sorts of projects are interesting as they are not necessarily about climate change but they have shortcomings within their message, to destroy and cut down trees for a statement? Does this make the point?
I read about her work in a book, the turntable record that spins at the speed of the earth and takesKatie Paterson – Future Library 4 years to end, as well as her ice record.
Katie Paterson
Here is her bio.
Katie Paterson (born 1981, Scotland) is widely regarded as one of the leading artists of her generation. Collaborating with scientists and researchers across the world, Paterson’s projects consider our place on Earth in the context of geological time and change. Her artworks make use of sophisticated technologies and specialist expertise to stage intimate, poetic and philosophical engagements between people and their natural environment. Combining a Romantic sensibility with a research-based approach, conceptual rigour and coolly minimalist presentation, her work collapses the distance between the viewer and the most distant edges of time and the cosmos.
Katie Paterson has broadcast the sounds of a melting glacier live, mapped all the dead stars, compiled a slide archive of darkness from the depths of the Universe, created a light bulb to simulate the experience of moonlight, and sent a recast meteorite back into space. Eliciting feelings of humility, wonder and melancholy akin to the experience of the Romantic sublime, Paterson’s work is at once understated in gesture and yet monumental in scope.
Katie Paterson has exhibited internationally, from London to New York, Berlin to Seoul, and her works have been included in major exhibitions including Turner Contemporary, Hayward Gallery, Tate Britain, Kunsthalle Wien, MCA Sydney, Guggenheim Museum, and The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. She was winner of the Visual Arts category of the South Bank Awards, and is an Honorary Fellow of Edinburgh University.
Katie Paterson is represented by Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, and James Cohan Gallery, New York.
Specifically, these two works interested me.
Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull, Solheimajökull
2007
Sound recordings from three glaciers in Iceland were pressed into three records, then cast and frozen using the meltwater from each corresponding glacier. The discs of ice were then played simultaneously on three turntables until they melted completely.
She created three records of the sounds of melting glaciers, recorded them into vinyl and then pressed them into an ice record, played it then let it melt. I like the idea and the metaphor here but I think it fell a bit short, how much energy went into producing this record to make a statement and using something like vinyl within it, What I read in eco-sonic media about how terrible vinyl records are and she had to have pressed one to then create a cast for the ice record.
As The World Turns
2010
A turntable that rotates in synchronisation with the Earth, revolving once every 24 hours. Playing Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, if performed from beginning to end, the record would play for four years, and be barely audible. The movement is so slow it is not visible to the naked eye, yet the record is turning, imperceptibly.
Now this one I like, the subtleness of it is really cool. For me, it brings a closer connection to the earth with the listener/watcher. As you can tell it is not moving, but in reality we are small compared to the Earth and our existence on this planet, we go by quickly. This installation shows us this in enhanced detail.
Angus came for a visiting practitioner lecture and it was fascinating. His lecture was on field notes and something he called.
“field notes against sonic exceptionalism”
Now this sentence has stuck with me since the lecture, field notes against sonic exceptionalism are a bold statement but also perhaps a good thought process. Sound arts and the whole canon do have this idea of sonic exceptionalism that sound is everything. If only we closed our eyes and listened maybe we’d understand more is what we say. But also as Angus discussed, the ecological issues with recorders that take these sounds into captured material is terrible for the environment. Capturing sounds with plastic recorders that have mined lithium for their batteries and cobalt for the chips. It destroys jungles, dangerous for the communities that work for little to no pay with no safety equipment. Perhaps the field note is a response to this.
Also field notes as, he believes that they can exist as of themselves, such as the work for Fieldwork for Future Ecologies, Radical Practice of art. Field notes as the specific piece of their own things, Field Notes as Voice (the Horror) He vocalises them, he took them too far he says, he started speaking his notes in the spaces that influenced them.
He finds field notes as a way of representing the environment he hears, he worked on a project with Simon James, translated by KYRIN Chen 2022,
He now will play us field recordings he considers field notes,
I think this whole field note process is super interesting towards my project, as a counter-argument and counter source of representation of environments, and also a response to my dissertation that doesn’t sound. Could the field recording be written, could the field recording be a drawing, a photo, or a captured sound. What is a field recording? Again big questions, but I want to take a small notepad with me when I field record and see the difference between the notepad and the recording through sound.
I should also do some research into field recordings and field notes?
I decided to do a first field recording trip around the Thames near my flat before I make bigger travels into other areas and use better equipment. Consider this an experiment and a test run. I am not sure what physical form my protect 2 will take but I am sure it will explore the themes from my dissertation, field recordings, acoustic ecology, can the benefits of listening to field recordings promote environmental change?
I took my phone, as I was told that my phone is a great tool for field recording, and wrote what I could hear. Inspired by Angus Carlyle and his lecture at UAL where he spoke about field notes as a more eco way of field recording, I thought why not do both?
I walked and cycled along the Thames until I came to this disused pier, I could hear the pier screech under the rough river splashing against it. I wrote some field notes.
“The river Thames was frothing, The ancient dock was decayed and squeaking as the waves and current bashed against its metal base. Squeaks that sounded like screams and quivers.”
I then recorded the audio. Found a closeby record shop and bought field recordings on vinyl of birds and savannas from Africa. I think my interests will develop and I’ll perhaps create something with the recordings I took today as an exercise of what I could do?
