“If what I say resonates with you, it is merely because we are both branches on the same tree.”
W.B. Yeats
Humans communicate. Trees communicate. Humans are trees. This project speculates about how we perceive the the plants, trees and the forest as a system. A backdrop for this speculation is the idea of trees that communicate. This idea rather comes from the sphere of art and literature than science. We all have read about talking trees in poems, fairy tales, myths and novels. But there are only few examples from the field of science. During the research I came across the scientific study by O.E. Wagner (W-waves and Plant Communication, 1988), about the capability of plants to communicate. Plants can emit chemical substances that can stimulate and communicate with other plants. The oscillations of these W-waves can be detected with electrical devices. Trees as transmitters and trees as receivers.
That undermines our idea of a forest as a quiet background for our exile from everyday urban reality. Whey know about us, every time we enter their territory. But we don’t know that they know. We lost it long time ago. What if we could perceive their communication?
The project is a speculative “gadget”, containing a future technology that is able to receive the W-waves and amplify them for us to hear. Using this technology when walking through the forest one would be able to listen to the communication of trees and their awareness of our presence. What would they tell about us?