The Blued Trees Symphony

Art isn't always about problem solving but it IS always about content. Historically, mapping has always implied a score for the future as much as embodying newly revealed information about place. As the effects of climate change caused by fossil fuel use have spread across the globe, data visualization reveals where, how and why we are losing bits and pieces of the familiar, from dependable seasons to species we might miss acutely, as trees that clean our water, soil and air or domesticated animals, like horses that occupy an iconic place in many cultural tropes. In The Blued Trees Symphony, problem solving and content merged and were mapped over climate change.

The research premise of my dissertation work 2010-15, was an idea extrapolated from physics, based on my previous experience with ecological restoration as art, that a small anomaly can precipitate large landscape consequences. My original premise was that that idea could be systematically applied to problems of environmental degradation.

My guiding principles to apply trigger point theory were the topic of my dissertation, "Trigger Point Theory as Aesthetic Acitivsm," at the University of Plymouth, UK. The outcome of that research was to identify six rules to determine how to analyze relationships between disparate data which might lead to identifying such an anomaly.

As an ecological artist, I had been aware for decades of the threats posed by global warming. Until 2015 however, I had spent my attention on wetlands restoration as art as one solution to sea level rise and species extinctions. In 2015, it seemed clear to me that across the globe, the only realistic solution to save ourselves from extinction was to immediately stop using fossil fuels.

At that point of clarity, I was approached by a group of activists who hoped to contest the installation of natural gas pipelines in New York State. They wanted to find an artist to apply the tactic of copyrighting land to protect it from natural gas corporations initiated by Peter von Teisenhausen in Alberta, Canada. Von Teisenhausen copyrighted his entire ranch as art in 1996 and demanded high fees to talk to corporate representatives. The legal theory of contesting eminent domain takings with copyright law, however, was never tested in the courts. In response to that idea, I designed a series of installations in the corridors where new pipelines were proposed. In each 1/3 mile of a proposed symphony, at least 10 trees were designated as tree-notes, painted from roots to canopy with a vertical sigil representing a sine wave. The paint was a non-toxic casein of ultramarine blue and buttermilk that would grow moss, becoming permanently integrated into the local habitat.

In 2018, a mock trial was produced by A Blade of Grass in the Cardozo School of Law in New York City to test the legal theory in The Blued Trees Symphony. It was adjudicated by Bronx Supreme Court Justice April Newbauer, who decided the outcome on the basis of case law, factual evidence, testimony from expert witnesses and briefs. The result was an injunction against the hypothetical corporation.

In 2010, I had taken a train trip from Maine to New Orleans during hurricane season to observe impacts of climate change along the coast and into the rust belt. From New Orleans, I went on to Baton Rouge to attend a conference on deltaic systems. There I met Dr. Eugene Turner, who became the scientist to monitor the impacts of the British Petroleum oil spill from Hurricane Katrina. Turner joined Dr. Jim White, then director of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) at the University of Colorado at Boulder and myself, to host a series of webcast conversations, Gulf to Gulf, about the impacts of climate change internationally. Initially we thought sharing and visualizing dire information might make a difference to change uncertain minds and hearts about the effects of fossil fuels.

In 2007, Dr. Jim White and I had begun work on Trigger Points/ Tipping Points, a film and a series of prints prepared for the "Weather Report" show at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art in Boulder, Colorado, curated by Lucy Lippard. Our goal was to study relationships between conflict zones and the impacts of climate change in deltaic regions in three locations: Bangladesh, New Orleans and the Nile. Our perceptions were stunning: the demographic disruptions of hundreds of millions of climate refugees and refugees from sea level rise and weather events would destabilize nations across the globe.

In 2009, as an observer for the University of Colorado at Boulder at the United Nations IPCC COP 15, in Copenhagen, I worked with the legal expert Don Brown on papers to be submitted about environmental justice for populations at risk due to climate change. We proposed empowering people to protect their cultural aspirations at least as much as their economic goals. We argued that protection could help to insure the cohesion of communities and their capacity to adapt to radical change. That experience helped me understand the implications of von Tiesenhausen's legal challenge more than a decade earlier to protect his ranch. The distinction between von Tiesenhausen's initiative and The Blued Trees Symphony was that the former copyrighted the ranch as land because the site specific art was located on his ranch. The Blued Trees Symphony copyrighted a series of complex relationships between the land and the ensuing artwork, which was what made the work uniquely habitat dependent.

By 2015, it was clear that information and art alone were inadequate to halt climate change. The Blued Trees Symphony, intended to solve the escalating problem of persistent pressure from fossil fuel corporations in the face of climate change crises. The fossil fuel corporations were determined to remain entrenched. My intention was to present a new point of view from environmental law to change policy. I applied the rules of trigger point theory to the law to develop that point of view. The premise that emerged proposed conflating what were the originalist definitions of copyright law, to protect the "spirit of art," and eminent domain law, to protect the "sacred home." In this case, our common home is a habitable planet. As teenage activist Greta Thunberg has proclaimed in effect, our common good requires us to address the contradiction between fossil fuel induced ecocide and habitat protection.

The Blued Trees Symphony was a strategic model, a score for a performance to intended as a proposal to replace systems of extractive, ecocidal economies with one that acknowledges our interdependence with other forms of life and biogeographies. I thought the human risk if we failed this moment would be ecosuicidal. Many scientists believe failure could mean the end of civilization.

We decided to initiate the project with an Overture in Peekskill, New York on the occasion of the Summer Solstice 2015. The location of the proposed pipelines for high velocity fracked gas would pass within 105' of a failing nuclear facility 30 miles from New York City. I foresaw that a possible accident near that facility could precipitate a disaster. The result would be Fukushima West.

Images of the painted trees, a map of their GPS locations and the score for the iterated measure were submitted for the initial copyright registration. In the score, I imagined the trees as silent operatic singers voicing their critical role in protecting the soil, air and water that all life depends upon.

When we knew the private land where we had installed the Overture would be imminently condemned by eminent domain to install the pipelines, I served a cease and desist order on the Spectra Corporation the fall of 2015 to protect the art on the Reynolds Hills land. Our order was contested with a, "dark money," letter from the company lawyers, threatening reprisal. Before I might have raised the funds for an injunction, estimated to cost $30,000., to my horror, the trees were cut down.

My initial dismay turned to resolve. At the invitation of private landowners whose land had not yet been condemned but whom were in the path of proposed pipelines, measures and individual trees continued to be painted across the continent totaling 80 GPS located sites. some included clusters of hundreds of painted trees, as those created under the direction of Robin Scully in Virginia and West Virginia.

In presentations and installations across the world, aspects of The Blued Trees Symphony were presented to the public.

The Blued Trees Symphony in the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology (KRICT) Art Gallery, Daejeon, South Korea 2017. The photomontage I created illustrated how sea level rise would decimate habitable landscapes. Imposed arbitrarily on those images where land might remain above the waters were a series of inserts, symbols representing possible Blued Trees measures, that could be future refugia for remaining terrestrial life. A pattern of suspended local quince branches recapitulated a spatial pattern for the audience to pass through based on the iterated measures of the First Movement. Each branch was painted ultramarine blue. The space was acoustically defined by the immersive sound of bird song recorded from the site of one tree-note in New York State. Installed for “Carbon Art Project” curated by Yu Hyun-Ju. 

The Blued Trees Symphony attempted to address a number of crucial issues, including the impact of methane leaks from natural gas pipelines and the effects of deforestation on soils, temperature, air and water. I went about addressing those issues as a series of aesthetic problems to be solved with the tools of artmaking.

There were a total of five movements to The Blued Trees Symphony. It began with the Overture. The First Movement has painted the tree-notes and continues. The Second Movement studied the Newtown Creek superfund site in Brooklyn, New York as an example of what could happen to an entire region if fossil fuel use continues unchecked. The Third Movement also continues to track the legal trajectory of the Blued Trees. The Coda was based on the 2016 American presidential Election and performed at that time. Each movement has an acoustic analog.

In the cover image, locations of the measures of The Blued Trees Symphony are indicated. To the left, the prostrate branch indicates the badly degraded Mississippi Water Basin, the third largest watershed in the world, due to agricultural run off. To the right, the vertical image indicates the degraded steppe culture of the Horse Tribes.

In addition to suffering crippling climate induced drought, the Horse Tribes are enduring the poisoning of their watersheds from rare mineral extractions in Inner Mongolia and Mongolia. As their grasslands vanish into desertification and their water is polluted, their horses die.

The Blued Trees Symphony created a map as a score for different behavior in the environment. The intention of the original iterated score was to slow down movement through the threatened habitat as it created sonified richness from anomalies in encounters between humans and other life. The score offered an imaginative strategic idea model to conflate anomalistic aspects of the legal system and align that model with science and Earth rights both symbolically and practically: as a thought experiment with realistic applications.

The extractive capitalist model is implicated in environmental war crimes, as, by author Naomi Klein. The Blued Trees Symphony project proposed a new legal avenue to allow humanity to transition in crisis and survive the Anthropocene. Mapping has a role in completing that transition.

An aspect of this project still being explored is that scoring spatial relationships between fixed elements, as the distribution of trees in a forest or a grove and those elements created by art and which can be moved, as aspects of performance, can guide discourse.

Features of the one-day installation and series of performances for Blued Trees Black Skies will be mapped to recapitulate previous aspects of The Blued Trees Symphony. Those features include a series of 20'x3' translucent banners that will be suspended from the trees of the grove, dancers choreographed by Yoshiko Chuma, 24 acoustic basses under the direction of Robert Black performing a score by Eve Beglarian, and 20' long blue painted branches on the ground. Placing those elements in relationship to each other and the audience will direct traffic.

Printed cards will be distributed to the audiences for return. The cards will be invitations to respond to some poetically inflected questions intended to address our choices.

The court of public opinion must decide what common good should be in the face of environmental urgency. Blued Trees Black Skies will be a public event at the height of the tourist season in New York City. The timing of this event before the American presidential election is intended to question what the Anthropocene era, a time when humans have come to dominate and degrade all natural systems, demands of us each.

The on-going legal saga of the Third Movement of The Blued Trees Symphony is being developed as the libretto for an opera-in-progress.

Unless otherwise indicated, all images, maps and visuals are the production of Aviva Rahmani copyright 2019.