Encoded Forest
Land art installation, 2016.
In collaboration with Sam Kronick, Ben Lotan, and Tara Shi.
Description
Encoded Forest is a land art piece that experiments with long term digital information preservation through organic, living materials rather than bits and bytes by encoding the wifi password for a residence in Point Arena, CA into a forest of redwood trees. The artists coded a simple app in Java that translated the wifi password into binary (0’s and 1’s), and then into “tree binary,” with trees for 1’s and no trees or blank spaces for 0’s. Over the course of 4 days, they planted 128 redwood trees in a large grid while performing various land-clearing rituals for the no-tree areas. The resultant forest is expected to live for thousands of years, but will require care as it is prone to corruption from deer, gopher and volunteer trees. Future wifi-seekers will be instructed to walk along the forest to decode the password.
Performances, Exhibitions, and Screenings
“Encoded Forest,” World Wide West, Point Arena, CA. July 16 2016.
Press
Programmatically-generated “tree-binary” that encodes a wifi password for Encoded Forest (2017).
