UTM 39N - The Parasol Pines 
A video study for the audio piece, UTM 39N, from the album Elegiya (out now on ROOM40)

P. Pinea trees are depicted in the earliest Renaissance landscape paintings and their silhouettes provide a familiar icon for our attempts to record the natural environment. When I first experienced them in person I found them to be radically different from how they are represented pictorially. It reminded me of what the term “landscape” originally denotes: it is not nature itself, but the framing of nature for human consumption. When filming the P. Pinea I encountered the landscape as a discrepancy between my immediate experience of the trees and my desire to record them. Within my camera's viewport, I attempted to contain the P. Pinea as static and photogenic entities. But in the process my attention filtered out other sensations, my legs ached from slow and steady tracking across an uneven terrain, and my arms went numb from lack of natural movement. The way that I normally related to the environment was replaced by a total concern for how the environment appeared to my camera. I was part of a new and synthetic constellation — terrain+me+camera+P.Pinea — that could in no way capture the experience I might otherwise have of the trees, one normally composed of a thousand micro-sensations and affective connections without regard for framing or consistent appearances. It is an encounter that all photographers, filmmakers, and field recordists have had and yet it conveys something profound about the relationship between media and the environment more broadly. Any attempts to record nature creates new artifacts that are custom to the sensors deployed. From the most banal tourist photographs to the densest network of ecological sensors, nature is always framed—always translated into a landscape—and only tangentially related to a more immediate experience we might otherwise have. 

Like so many other places on the planet, the Mediteranian is undergoing radical environmental changes that are slowly foreclosing the future of the P. Pinea. Though the species has been a defining feature of this landscape for thousands of years, they are no longer seeding future growth at a regenerative rate. Soon the only experience of the P.Pinea within a Mediteranian climate will be through their depictions in media.

[PROJECTS]

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25 MAY 2021 - Foxy Digitalis