"My aim was to write the work in such a way that the listener’s sensory perception of the natural surroundings could be creatively folded into the imaginary experience offered through this second-person narrative--a story where YOU realize that trees have found a way to commandeer the cell-phone grid in order to allow humanity to "feel" what a tree experiences when it is being cut down."
Forest Talk Radio: Old Growth Temagami is a walking adventure installed at the White Bear Trail in Temagami ON. In this GPS triggered-audio web-app experience the surrounding natural environment augments the reality of your digital device.
As you walk the trail with your cellphone in your hand you discover a world where the organic feeds into the digital and vice-versa, where the ‘technological-human' can be seen as a natural phenomenon and trees can be seen as info-tech pioneers on the cusp of going digital.
"I would like to believe that in a world where animals and plants evolve together,
Responding to each other’s ability to sense the world,
Maybe trees are evolving to one day meet us on our telecommunications level.
Are trees on the evolutionary cusp of going digital?
Perhaps they’ve gone digital already...."
ENTRY - Extensions - Technology Arc (GPS 47.0597542,-79.7723352)
When I first envisioned writing this story, I wanted to set it in this ancient forest because I figured how better to hint-at-hope in a post-apocalyptic narrative than to place the characters in an environment ripe with perseverance and survival.
But as you meander the White Bear Forest pondering the ecological principles of forest communication, (mycorrhizal fungi, social insects etc) as they are revealed in the narrative, I hope you can start to see how trees and humans are similar in one key way: We both found ways to communicate with others of our kind over great distances, in effect, transcending our physical bodies. Trees accomplish this through developing symbiotic relationships with fungi and social insects, and we humans have done this through the creation of a global telecommunications grid.
Ultimately, I hope that you can imagine how Nature may in fact be trying to communicate with us humans and to further ask ourselves whether or not we are willing to answer at he call.
