works | Tree Skype 2015

5-minute excerpt from a 60-minute high-definition video with sound.

Documentation of a live video conference between a Eucalyptus tree in the Oakland hills and another in Sydney, Australia. This gesture aimed to open up a space in which a conversation could occur between two Eucalyptus trees - one a ‘native’ species and the other an ‘invasive’ one - in just the kind of distance-erasing technological environment that has accelerated similar global flows of people and plants. I wanted viewers to look at trees in relation to each other, and in a shared relation with us in the world, rather than as objects peripheral to a human centeredness.