In my continuing “better late than never” series of exhibitions I wished I had reviewed while open, but still feel are worth noting: Sometimes a small exhibition can cast a wide net. Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology: Trees, Time, and Technology, an exhibition of work by Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg at the Skirball Cultural Center (which was on view through March 2) is a great example of how a seemingly simple idea can not only be a work of art, but also provide a teaching moment, and be an engine for social action.
Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg are a married couple who collaborate as artists. Goldberg is a professor of engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, and Shlain is an successful author and interdisciplinary artist.
For the exhibition, Shlain and Golberg repurposed salvaged tree sections whose time-marking rings are used to create taxonomies on certain subjects, such as the pursuit of knowledge, mathematics, California history, and Jewish history. This information was burned into the surface of the tree sections by a process known as pyrography (writing with fire, literally).
“Using ancient practices like pyrography alongside the newest predictive language technologies, like AI, Tiffany and Ken examine how history, the future, and hope can be intertwined in this ingenious exploration of trees and our natural environment,” said Skirball President and CEO Jessie Kornberg in the exhibition press release. “Trees figure prominently across many religions, including the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life, so exploring these and other narratives that trees may have borne witness to in the exhibition is fascinating.”
Given that this exhibition was at the Skirball, after seeing the works of salvaged wood I could have said ‘Dayenu’ – they are remarkable works, but Goldberg and Shlain have a more far reaching vision about the public health benefit of trees in cities. As part of the exhibition, they demonstrate how AI and machine learning can optimize our urban forests (the trees in our cities). Tracking trees by neighborhood, they propose, helps create a more sound environmental policy to, in their words, “facilitate personal reflections and connections for visitors”.
Inspired by artist Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles photo and video archive (1965–present in the Getty Collection), Goldberg and Shlain have created a bird’s eye view of LA’s urban treescapes overhead of four major LA thoroughfares, such as Hollywood, Sunset, Manchester, and Whittier Boulevards. The differences between their tree cover speak to the inequities in our urban ecology.
Finally, Shlain and Goldberg also provided a website as a way for individuals to register the trees on their blocks or in their neighborhood to create custom tree tributes where individuals can add their personal reflections and learn about the tree’s life and LA events.
This small exhibition delivered (and has the potential to continue to deliver) insight, knowledge, new ways of seeing, experiencing, and enhancing the health of our cities. Or to put it in the language of bumper stickers, “From small acorns grow might oaks.” This exhibition was housed in a small space, but its works and the ideas animating it are deep, large and expansive.