Last Friday I visited the
Tree Museum, a public art project by Katie Holten. To be frank, the highlight of the field trip was seeing Vito Acconci set up his new installation in the front lobby of the Bronx Museum.
On paper, I thought Katie Holten’s idea was fascinating and noble– one hundred trees selected to celebrate a boulevard one hundred years old, and one hundred different stories to match the diversity of the trees and community. It used existing resources, was something accessible to almost everyone, and it integrated the community. The problem, I thought, lay not in her idea, but rather, the execution.
First off, the trees are difficult to find. I am giving her the benefit of the doubt and assuming that when the exhibit opened on June 21st, the trees were more clearly marked. I saw one with a neon green ribbon, and am assuming that they were all pegged like so at the exhibit’s birth. The second hurdle I found was that once you dial the number and extension, the message is extremely difficult to hear. I’m not sure if it’s due to the audio quality, or the voice of the speaker, or both. Even with my headphones that turn the rumble of buses into a mere whisper, I still was straining to hear the voice on the other end. The messages were diverse, like the pamphlet had promised. The first message from the tree outside of the Bronx Museum was about an apple tree that resides behind the museum. Other messages I listened to ranged from a man playing drums to a high school student talking about the genus of the tree.
Below is a photo of the single ribboned tree:
Another thing I didn’t like was how the transcripts are not available online. As a web developer, one of my main concerns is making websites accessible to everyone, regardless of whether you are blind, deaf, or using IE5 on a Mac. I feel like she took wanted to make the exhibit accessible, public, and community-based, so she could have taken the extra step and put the transcripts of the interviews online so the deaf can read them. Also, some people don’t have phones, so it would be nice if each tree had some sort of scrolling marquee that transcribed the message into both English and Spanish.
All in all, I liked Holten’s idea to celebrate the 100-year-old Grand Concourse. I think to make the exhibit better, however, she could have used better sound and/or voice actors, and made the trees more identifiable and obvious that they are a part of an exhibit. If I were walking past a tree, I would not notice the green sticker at the base. And also, it’s rare for someone in passing on the way to work to stop and listen to what this tree has to say, especially if the sound quality is so terrible.
This entry was posted
on Sunday, September 27th, 2009 at 11:32 pm and is filed under Comm Lab.
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