In a time of ever-increasing climate crisis, the recognition of the importance of forests and tree-cover remains critical. Citizen Tree is a work-in-progress project that playfully engages the public with the importance of forests through a provocative, per-formative, technological-ecological artistic intervention. CT is a mobile eucalyptus tree designed to travel through the Melbourne CBD, acting as if it is an-other independent inhabitant of the city. The project relates to recent tree planting initiatives of the City of Melbourne, as well as the tree emailing social experiment of Melbourne’s urban forest. Previous works by the artist that engage with the agency of natural systems with human perception are discussed as background to the project. Citizen Tree engages with the following ISEA themes, including creative robotics and human-machine partnerships, posthuman, transhuman, and ’more than human’ paradigms, the politics of machine learning algorithms and other new optical regimes.

My artistic activity is the testimony of my own experience of the immanence of the self. This intimate identity phenomenon is a form of intuitive and instantaneous thought that passes through the body and touches consciousness. Inspired by the archetypal tree, my approach is inspired by phenomenology because my works are journeys to the limits of our understanding of life. These are open-ings onto the dimension of being that escapes us. Through my approach, I seek a deconstruction of appearances in order to access this reality through the exploration of fractal space. Modern tech-nology and the mobile phone, emblems of our modern societies, are reduced to noble functions of tools revealing a new superior identity.

The piece, “Woody’s Last Laugh: Gone for All Seasons” is a video project built around the disturbing fact that the iconic cartoon character, “Woody the Woodpecker,” was modeled on the now probably extinct ivory-billed woodpecker found in the Southeast United States. There has been no confirmed sight-ing of an ivory-billed woodpecker since 1944 and it is only by virtue of occasional unconfirmed reported sightings that the species has not been removed from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s Endangered Species List as extinct.
In this video, Woody is removed from his 1941 film “Pantry Panic”—made only 3 years before the last undisputed recorded sighting of the ivory-billed woodpecker in the wild. The ani-mation is otherwise unaltered. In addition to removing the images of Woody, the soundtrack of the animation is edited to remove Woody’s iconic and very identifiable laugh. Thus, silence is left where Woody would have otherwise had his dialogue, much like the silence in the trees left by the ivory-billed woodpecker’s probable extinction.

"Tilling Roots and Seeds" is an international cooperation project between Ars Electronica (AT), KILOWATT (IT), University of Barcelona (ES) and Quo Artis (ES) as lead partner and co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

"Tilling Roots and Seeds" aims to enhance cultural cooperation and capacity for artistic research and practice on the topic of the plant biodiversity crisis and sustainable food system.

The project also supports the role of art as a tool to awaken a critical understanding of climate change that sheds light on how humans generate and affect it through the current food consumption systems. The project assumes that innovative solutions require the engagement of those involved in farming and food production as well as the voice of communities, as innovation can derive also from traditional knowledge.

This project builds upon the lessons learned through the EU funded project "Roots and Seeds XXI". It further expands the capabilities and opportunities of the EU creative sector to contribute to fight the biodiversity crisis and the environmental degradation of our times and opens up opportunities for artists to collaborate with the scientific and farming sectors to imagine future sustainable scenarios. It also transfers knowledge and disseminates good practices and results to the cultural and scientific sector as well as to the general public. In this second phase, the project will also engage food consumers and promote mental, emotional, and physical well-being of current and future generations.