"Surely there is something more in each of the trees,
some living soul.
In my soul I plainly heard the wood-spirit join the refrain,
As some old tree thrill’d with its soul:
Know I bear the soul befitting me,
I too have consciousness, identity,
And all the rocks and mountains have, and all the earth."
-Walt Whitman, excerpt from 'Trees'
'Imagining a Forest' is the tenth published overnight broadcast in the Sleepbuilding series of longform generative ambient sessions. It was streamed as it was composed on February 22nd 2023,
The further in I cut a path into my overgrown creative real estate, the more apparent it becomes that there must exist certain works that can act as beacons - well-lit gates of welcoming, easy to locate, open and unconditional in their acceptance.
Not only do I feel obligated to build such functional structures, out of the basic need to share things that bring me to a state of happiness, but also because these open doors are a logistic necessity - realms of familiarity, pinpointed across the map, anchors of orientation.
'Imagining a Forest' is one such work, one of several I could now name that, for my experiences with them, could be a lighthouse in a dark and stormy night on the coastline. It is both a dream hovering in the dim air above a sleeping automaton, and the machine itself, having the dream. It presumes nothing about us, voyeuristically listening in, while we wonder if we are a part of this dream ourselves. The machine is ambivalent, it continues on as it dissolves the lines in the air that separate the two worlds.
In this moment, which the machine emanates for twelve hours, nothing happens, and for that, I am in awe of the beauty of being comfortably inert. The machine has grown this massive forest from only a single branch, and so it is my doing to build a fire at its entrance, where we can all sit and gaze at the soft colors fluttering in the even softer breath of this surreal blue wood.
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