Audiences are invited to lose themselves in the Rushworth Forest lands of the Ngurai Illum Wurrung people in Victoria through an immersive marrying of art, science and data in Ghost Trees at the National Film and Sound Archive until 8 September.
Created by James McGrath (visuals) and Gary Sinclair (audio), it originally began as a pandemic project: Mr McGrath put down his paintbrushes, wanting to dive into works based on environmental data.
The data used was collated by Ghent University Professor Kim Calders and is stored on the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN), where Mr McGrath was able to access it.
“They let me have it, millions and millions of data points, a huge Excel spreadsheet,” says Mr McGrath. “Then I had to find a way of making this climate data evocative and emotional. Essentially, it’s a 3D scan of the forest that is endangered and becomes its memory, so when the forest gets burnt in bushfires or anything like that, this digital recording is all that’s left of it.”
The visual artist has never visited the Rushworth Forest in person, and says now, it wouldn’t be the same.
“I’m very much a studio artist, I want to theorise it and decontextualise it to some degree.”
Mr McGrath created the moving visuals from TERN’s three-dimensional light detection and ranging scans.
“It’s very much like how the scientists would see it using their own software,” he says. “The colour comes from their analytic overlays, gradients, that sort of stuff. It is an interesting process. I removed myself as an artist to some degree, let the data go from the spreadsheet to the visuals fairly simply.”
The audio is imperative to the experience. Mr McGrath and Mr Sinclair are pub mates, and often tossed ideas to each other during the pandemic. The sound is designed so it moves around the viewer as you progress through the sequence of spaces. Mr Sinclair crafted the tracking from eco-acoustic recordings, and paired it with melody generated from the spatial data points of the trees.
“He really sets up a beautiful tempo based on these supersites, that have decades of audio and visuals,” says Mr McGrath. “He could take this vast resource of this site and pull out the elements of years and years of recording.”
Since its creation, Ghost Trees has travelled the globe, but Mr McGrath says its iteration at NFSA is perfect; it is not too big or too small, but just right for people to lose themselves.
“I want [people] to be immersed, for 10 minutes of their life [to] just let go and listen and watch and literally be part of the forest, be inside a tree, blow down a branch.”
A special addition for this run of Ghost Trees takes a 19th-century theatre technique: Pepper’s ghost, an illusion inside a central pod. It acts as a window into other Australian ecosystems; these include trees found in the Botanic Gardens of Sydney, Tasmania’s Huon Valley, and the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales.
“I’ve done a new piece based on three different trees, again all scanned by Professor Calders,” says Mr McGrath. “I really want [visitors], especially children, to go in there and stick their head in. I hope they come away realising science is a beautiful thing, that there are many ways of looking at nature, and this is just one of them.”
Ghost Trees is a celebratory piece that offers another way to look at and interact with nature. Mr McGrath hopes other artists may be inspired to use scientific data in their own works. He says archives and data collection are underused resources for creatives.
“This data that I used is just a slither on an iceberg of all the amazing data they generate,” he says. “No-one really knows it is there, particularly artists. I feel like by doing this piece, I hope it shows a way they can find a way to it as well. Let the scientists do science and let us [artists] try and take it somewhere emotional and evocative.”
Walk through the forest in Ghost Trees at the National Film and Sound Archive until 8 September; nfsa.gov.au
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