The Silviculture Museum
performed at: chashama
collaborators: Panoply Performance Laboratory, Esther Neff, Chiasui Chen, Shawna Ferrato
The Silviculture Museum
Performances nightly October 13-25, 2008 at 7pm, 37th Street in Manhattan.
Installation open 10am-7pm, with live software “Pine Thumbs;” in the moment weather and street sound is filtered through software to create ‘rooted’ music that grows on itself. Tours of the museum performed by Herbie Go and video avatar of Chiasui Chen.
A collaboration between Chiasui Chen (performance on video, translation into Mandarin and Taiwanese), Esther Neff (text supervisor, director, installation fabrication), Brian McCorkle (software, songs), Shawna Ferrato (fabrication assistance and prop-making), and Herbie Go (tour performer, translation in Tagolog). Installation/performance uses silviculture (agroforestry) and its history in Taiwan and the Phillippines as a meta-phor for colonization, immigration, and cultural identity. Roots, rows, production, and their implications are discussed in a museum tour video in Mandarin and English and live museum “volunteer” Herbie Go. Cardboard pine trees, pine air fresheners (Taiwan produces the world’s artificial Christmas trees), bronze buffaloes, silviculture technique displays, and heeeeerbiiiiiiciiiiides invites visitors to crawl beneath a mint green pine frame and “immerse themselves in (neon lanyard) roots.”
Here is an excerpt of the installed “Pine Thumbs;” software, which “grew” using L-Systems:
../assets/mp3s/silviculture.mp3?autoplay=0&loop=0&controls=1