Cost Of Innovation – Guest Journal by Miia Kettunen

I´m looking at the majestically branching trees from the window of my apartment in Holmfirth. A beautiful sight that I’ve learned to love as it connects me to an immediate feeling of gratitude that intuition and a deep interest have brought me this far. Thousands of kilometers away from home to explore new artistic skills on making the interconnection between human and trees more tangible in the artistic process that I call ´Points of coherence`.

Tree’s underground fungal network mycorrhiza partners with the roots of the trees in building up a network of communication between trees that seems to form an intrinsic consciousness of its own. It has tickled my human consciousness to such an extent that I have felt that mycelium could be one connecting point in reaching into the realms of the trees. While looking at the flickering leaves and the strong trunks from my window, I also feel connected to the old forest in our land up in the north. There near decaying birches lays my attempt for connection with the help of mycelium. I have placed on the soil three incubated cardboard boxes with birch saprotroph Pleurotus Pulmonarius hyphae inside. With the mind of a curious documentarist, I have followed the transformation and how the boxes that I have affectionately named ’ A love letter to a tree’ will be received by its immediate ecosystem.

As a part of the `Points of coherence` -process creating of ´A love letter to a tree` has not only connected me to a forest with a specific location or to the three rotting birch trunks which are in their cycle of life somewhere between an actual tree and an eternal mass of the soil. It has generated a sense of coherence and understanding for the invisible intelligence that trees anywhere in the world are holding.

With that sense of mesmerization, I have had long walks in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park feeling the connection in the network of individual trees and small forests. Concurrently, I have received generous support and immersive push from the skillful Invisible Flock team into the world of different 3D material producing devices and related software that can contribute to the `Points of coherence´ process. No wonder then, that yesterday when sitting under a magnificent oak tree and waiting for a 3D -LiDAR scanner to finish one of its scans around an old yew tree, I felt utmost happiness for being able to incorporate the living organic and technologically created dimensions that aim at drawing out our inherent connectedness with the trees.

Miia Kettunen – Artist in Residence