The Pines
Sound artist and filmmaker Joshua Bonnetta wants to know what happens when a human listener exits a landscape. How might the soundscape differ? How is our presence affecting the recording?
His ambitious long-form work The Pines I-IV, via Shelter Press and The Dim Coast, looks to interrogate some of these questions, capturing the sonic life of a single pine tree in upstate New York over the course of a year via remote recordings, edited into four hours of audio which will be released as a 4CD set with an essay by acclaimed nature writer Robert Macfarlane and a foreword by curator Jake Moore.
Macfarlane suggests that the forest knows when it is being listened to. He proposes that this project offers an answer to the question of whether a tree in a forest makes any sound at all if nobody is there to hear it. Bonnetta turns that question around, entangling it in the surrounding environment to ask what sort of noise plants and animals make when there is no human listener.
A total of 8760 hours of audio were captured by a microphone strapped 10ft up a tree's trunk in Tioga County, which was then reworked into a single hour of sound for each season, capturing events in and around the tree's branches and immediate environment. Weather and wildlife, coyotes and owls, the creaking of branches under the weight of snow and ice – all act as a window into the sound of this place absent of humans.
Bonnetta purposefully chose a site he already knew and had easy access to, but which might show itself differently when captured with durational sound recording technology. He returned every few weeks to collect and replace storage cards and batteries, editing lengthy audio files using a combination of listening and looking at the visualized audio spectrum.
The draw of this type of recording Bonnetta locates in a childhood memory, of wolves captured on tape. He recalls a memory from his childhood in a rural area in Ontario, of two brothers claiming to have recorded wolves howling. This project feels rooted in the initial wonder of that listening experience.
Original: $49.34
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$14.80The Pines
Sound artist and filmmaker Joshua Bonnetta wants to know what happens when a human listener exits a landscape. How might the soundscape differ? How is our presence affecting the recording?
His ambitious long-form work The Pines I-IV, via Shelter Press and The Dim Coast, looks to interrogate some of these questions, capturing the sonic life of a single pine tree in upstate New York over the course of a year via remote recordings, edited into four hours of audio which will be released as a 4CD set with an essay by acclaimed nature writer Robert Macfarlane and a foreword by curator Jake Moore.
Macfarlane suggests that the forest knows when it is being listened to. He proposes that this project offers an answer to the question of whether a tree in a forest makes any sound at all if nobody is there to hear it. Bonnetta turns that question around, entangling it in the surrounding environment to ask what sort of noise plants and animals make when there is no human listener.
A total of 8760 hours of audio were captured by a microphone strapped 10ft up a tree's trunk in Tioga County, which was then reworked into a single hour of sound for each season, capturing events in and around the tree's branches and immediate environment. Weather and wildlife, coyotes and owls, the creaking of branches under the weight of snow and ice – all act as a window into the sound of this place absent of humans.
Bonnetta purposefully chose a site he already knew and had easy access to, but which might show itself differently when captured with durational sound recording technology. He returned every few weeks to collect and replace storage cards and batteries, editing lengthy audio files using a combination of listening and looking at the visualized audio spectrum.
The draw of this type of recording Bonnetta locates in a childhood memory, of wolves captured on tape. He recalls a memory from his childhood in a rural area in Ontario, of two brothers claiming to have recorded wolves howling. This project feels rooted in the initial wonder of that listening experience.
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Sound artist and filmmaker Joshua Bonnetta wants to know what happens when a human listener exits a landscape. How might the soundscape differ? How is our presence affecting the recording?
His ambitious long-form work The Pines I-IV, via Shelter Press and The Dim Coast, looks to interrogate some of these questions, capturing the sonic life of a single pine tree in upstate New York over the course of a year via remote recordings, edited into four hours of audio which will be released as a 4CD set with an essay by acclaimed nature writer Robert Macfarlane and a foreword by curator Jake Moore.
Macfarlane suggests that the forest knows when it is being listened to. He proposes that this project offers an answer to the question of whether a tree in a forest makes any sound at all if nobody is there to hear it. Bonnetta turns that question around, entangling it in the surrounding environment to ask what sort of noise plants and animals make when there is no human listener.
A total of 8760 hours of audio were captured by a microphone strapped 10ft up a tree's trunk in Tioga County, which was then reworked into a single hour of sound for each season, capturing events in and around the tree's branches and immediate environment. Weather and wildlife, coyotes and owls, the creaking of branches under the weight of snow and ice – all act as a window into the sound of this place absent of humans.
Bonnetta purposefully chose a site he already knew and had easy access to, but which might show itself differently when captured with durational sound recording technology. He returned every few weeks to collect and replace storage cards and batteries, editing lengthy audio files using a combination of listening and looking at the visualized audio spectrum.
The draw of this type of recording Bonnetta locates in a childhood memory, of wolves captured on tape. He recalls a memory from his childhood in a rural area in Ontario, of two brothers claiming to have recorded wolves howling. This project feels rooted in the initial wonder of that listening experience.
