Presented as part of the Hexagram Network Garden at the Ars Electronica Festival 2021, on September 8, 2021.
This documentation is a restitution of MÉDIANE Canada Research Chair’s inaugural art installation, presented outdoors in July 2021 near the Frédéric-Back Tree House at Montréal Botanical Garden’s Espace pour la vie. bois eau métal is research-creation project conceived as an open-air laboratory exploring forests, imaginaries, and climate change, and bringning together technological arts, forest sciences, and public engagement.
How to express visually a tree’s strategies for drinking water in dry periods? The installation experiments artistically with the ecophysiological data of three trees — a sugar maple, an American beech and a balsam fir — collected by the research programme SmartForests Canada, from July to September 2020 in the lower Laurentians, Quebec. At the Jardin, data’s expression is combined with video and audio compositions and a custom-made weather station collecting units in situ. The artwork proposes tree technologies (internal hydrological system, photosynthesis) and machines as witness and memory, up close and from afar, of a continuous sensing relation between forest, weather and climate; a situated, constantly variable, cyclical and energetic exchange.
The co-construction of experiential knowledges opens in an assemblage of temporary architectural structures, a site linking soil, the living environment and the atmosphere that can weave a sympathy, a sharing, between trees, living millennial allies, and urban communities.
About Ælab
Gisèle Trudel is an artist. She works under the name Ælab since 1996, an artist research unit co-founded with Stéphane Claude, who is a composer and sound engineer, and Head of Audio Research at OBORO. Ælab’s commitment to collaboration and creative dissemination are ways of thinking and doing that try to bridge different methods of inquiry. Their process-oriented investigations creatively engage art and technology as intertwined with philosophy. Trudel is a professor at UQAM’s École des arts visuels et médiatiques and a member of Hexagram. She holds the Canada Research Chair MÉDIANE in Arts, Ecotechnologies of Practice and Climate Change (2020-2025). aelab.com mediane.uqam.ca
MÉDIANE Team 2020-2021
Natalia Balska (sensors), Pier Oliver Bourgault (production assistant). Maxime Boutin (technical direction), Antoine Caron (production and research assistant), Stéphane Claude (co-conceptor), Camille Courier (production and research assistant), Jean-François Duguay (production assistant), Zoé Fauvel (project manager), Dan Kneeshaw (lead scientist, SmartForests), Sylvie Laplante (research assistant). Marie-Eve Morissette (Touch Designer), Aurélie Painnecé (graphic designer), Jacques Perron (publications consultant), Caroline Pierret, Richard-Max Tremblay (photographers), Kévin Pinvidic (3D and architectural renderings), Christoforos Pappas (engineer and scientist, SmartForests), chantal t paris (research assistant), Archie Reid (production and research assistant), Gisèle Trudel (co-conceptor).
With support from The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), The Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI), The Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC), École des arts visuels et médiatiques (UQAM), Hexagram-UQAM, SmartForests Canada, Espace pour la vie – Jardin botanique de Montréal
