Aspects of Trees

Video of the live improvisation, Aspects of Trees by Andrew Denton and Teresa Connors, performed February 2, 2018, with Dr. Ellen Waterman (Flute/Voice), Jing Xia (Guzheng), and Teresa Connors (Laptop and iPad) during the Newfound Music Festival XV is now available online.

Aspects of Trees is one of a series of ongoing projects between filmmaker Andrew Denton and IICSI Postdoctoral Fellow, composer/creative technologist Teresa Connors. The subject of this work is the escalating pine beetle epidemic that has decimated forests on the west coast of North America. This work is the result of a two-year field recording process that comprises video footage and stills from the infected forests, as well as audio captured inside and on the surface of pine trees.

As a hyperimprovisational system for the live acoustic instrument, laptop performer (Max patch) and visual projections, Aspects of Trees operates within a performative ontology as a tactic for opening up dialogue around anthropogenic climate change.

The video, including details of the work, can be accessed through this link: https://vimeo.com/262273964

In addition to the live improvisation video is the article “In Environments: The convergence and divergence of practice”  published in the journal Organized Sound in which Andrew Denton and Teresa Connors discuss the creative directions they have traversed in their extensive audiovisual collaborative endeavors. They present various theoretical and philosophical influences and, as a case-study, critique their collaboration Aspects of Trees. “It’s of interest to note that Aspects of Trees demarcates our diverging practice as collaborators: Denton moved toward fixed-media formats using only location sound while my creative research began to explore non-linear systems, which includes improvisation,” says Connors.