Archeology of Sky #1: Climate Records

2023

Protocol of listening: A color sensor placed on an arm of a record player and attached to and Arduino detects the changes in color of wood rings, allowing access to climate inputs of past skies registered in tree trunks. The electrical signals of the color sensor feed an algorithm developed in MaxSP that translated the input signal into sound waves.

The work explores wood as a memory device that stores present and past skies. Taking principles of dendroclimatology, the science that uses tree rings to reconstruct the past climate conditions, variations in colors and width of tree rings are interpreted as sound waves by a color sensor creating a listening space of past climatic conditions. The installation has an initial collection of tree records made out of different species of found wood collected in Albany NY during the arts residency “Listening to the Sky”  at Arts Letters and Numbers. The records open the possibility  to interact and explore different past climatic records through sound. Tree trunks are directly implicated in the formation of clouds and behavior of weather patterns, as they circulate water from the soil to the sky. This implication leaves an analog print in the trunks providing the opportunity to bridge time lines between present and future climates. Regarding wood as memory questions the materiality around and its relationship to weather.