Branching Songs: Clear Cut Chorus ( Sunshine Coast Arts Centre, Sechelt, B.C.)

Clear Cut Chorus was exhibited at the Sunshine Coast Arts Council gallery (SCAC), June 23-August 13, 2023. This recording is an example of the installation system output.

Please see the Branching Songs website for additional information and context.

(text below is from the Branching Songs site)

Clear Cut Chorus is an immersive media installation that speaks to the irreparable damage of clear-cutting. The Sandy Hook clear-cut near Porpoise Bay on the Sunshine Coast is listed as “Private Managed Forest #503”. It is a now-decimated land on a shíshálh burial ground. Enormous slash piles — the remnants of clear-cut logging — punctuate the landscape which is a tangle of stumps, small trees and other ‘left over’ materials. The occasional old maple tree still stands tall, alive on the land because they're considered worthless to the timber industry. Despite the stop work order, the damage has been done to the shíshálh Nation and the forest ecosystem.

Using sound and computation, photography and LiDAR technology, the team produced this generative artwork as a lament for this land — and all clear-cuts. The computational techniques reanimate the trees and forest in ever-changing layers of song. The software traces the face of each stump and reads their tree story/life story, history. This story is mapped to the sounds giving voice to the tree-memory, and forming the composition. Each resonator reproduces the sound from a specific tree and acts as a tree body, still standing. The visuals are fragments and incomplete instances, recalling the arboreal ancestors no longer here.

Clear Cut Chorus was produced by:

Simon Lysander Overstall, software programming
M. Simon Levin, photographs and 3D models of slash piles
Giorgio Magnanensi, resonators
Julie Andreyev, installation design