Tree Rings Player

By Laura Cortés-Rico & Maya Pierce

This project was part of the class Disturbing Settlement , by Professor Amiel Bize. It is a vinyl player that reproduces (speculated) acoustic memories of trees located in the Arts Quad at Cornell University. Focusing on trees as some of the oldest dwellers of a place, we asked, what if we imagine a future where humans can feel and interpret trees' inscriptions of their memories and emotions? As we thought of this future, we searched how the trees preserve their stories. We found that each year, a new layer of wood envelops the tree and appears as a ring in the stump. This ring's appearance is not uniform but, as dendrochronologists argue, depends on environmental conditions such as weather and surrounding plants. But, what if they also depend on the emotions of the tree? How could we feel their testimonies? When we thought of testimonies, we imagined them as oral histories, and in that sense, we decided to focus on how to listen to them. We proposed an artifact that emulates a vinyl player, as if the inscriptions on the vinyl record were the engravings on a tree. Find more info in the class' website.