Fionnáin @ephemeral@mograph.social

I realised recently that the different publications, video and research from my 'wood wide web' project were a little scattered all over the internet, so I've created an archive page where to link everything together, to find everything a littler more easily:

https://shanefinan.org/visual_art_pages/woodwideweb.html

(reposted because of a typo on the link!)

#introduction

I'm a visual #artist working who builds #interactive digital media installations. I'm a supporter of #opensource and #commonage or #commons (digital and physical).

I am working on projects about 'networks' (woodland, digital, human) and planning to use a platform for a project in the UK later this year.

Look forward to meeting #artist #curator #environmentalist #programmer or anyone interested in a world built on community!

I'll post some recent #artworks here to get started.

New blog post for Newcastle University about networks of "chthonic communication", or the movement of signals underground.

https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/cre/2020/07/21/soil-fungi-and-chthonic-communication/?s=09

One of the things that upsets me about the over-zealous use of trackers on websites is how pointless most of them are.

I used to manage analytics for a company back in 2012 (before GDPR) and they were so meaningless I used to spend time making up assumptions about the numbers. The quantified figures give almost no information.

Targetted advertising might have value (like targeting art opportunities to artists) but by and large it is a waste of electricity.

"Today, some 35 years after Stallman’s 4Fs, we can see that Free and Open Source Software is, in almost all conceivable ways, triumphant. It has won its struggles against Microsoft, it is the core of almost all smartphones, it lies at the heart of the networked world we all inhabit.
Amidst all this glory, however, there is something utterly broken about the FOSS world. In short, it is one-sided, devoid of economic rights, and an active agent in the oppression of us all."

https://lipu.dgold.eu/original-sin.html

What I am seeing is a lot of people who love forests, love trees, and love biodiversity, but argue over the philosophy of ecology and economy.

Some see the importance of economics and social growth, and human control over forests as crucial. Others think that we should not control any of our forests, and that wildness will save our global ecology.

I find the dichotomy of arguments from inside specialisms fascinating.

I read a book by a forester who said that trees need high level predators to protect from foragers like deer or goats. I read another book by a plant bilogist who said that our idea of a forest is shaped by our own recent human memory, and that a lot of damage from foragers might make a healthier forest than we can know.

I spoke to a Forester who derided the "Trump-style" arguments of protestors who called for more native tree planting while showing the benefits of plantations in the development of biodiversity and fungal ecology. I spoke to a forest manager of a "rewilding" native tree planting project who spoke about how plantations stifle the soil and limit the growth of other species, pushing the importance of soil health.

I spoke to a professor in fungal ecology who told me how trees and fungi rely on each other, symbiotically generating and sharing resources for one another. I spoke to a professor in Microbiology who said that that reliance is competition not collaboration, what he called "mutual parasitism", where everything competes for finite resources while acknowledging that they need one another for this.

Part of my process as an artist is dialogue. One thing I've learned from all the people I've spoken to about forests is that even among those who love trees there are differences in understanding, something I put down to learning from different schools of philosophy.

Some examples of my conversations and observations follow: