Transmission Wood Paris
2018

The video TRANSMISSION WOOD is part of an ongoing project called ‘field notes from the wild,’ in which Judith Egger explores the complex relationships between today's Western society and ‘the wilderness.’ It documents a secret, nocturnal experiment in which a giant wooden antenna disguised as a street sign attempts to communicate with the ‘wilderness’ of the city streets and their arboreal inhabitants. ‘Will any messages be received, can any connections be made, can the ancient “tree sense” be activated? (Judith Egger, 2018)’. This investigation takes place in an almost surreal, dreamlike, nocturnal situation and ends with the first light of dawn. The city is empty and unusually quiet, no night owls, only the silent stone of its buildings and the bare infrastructure. The life of plants can fill this emptiness; trees never sleep, they transform the gases of the day into the gases of the night, reversing processes without being asked. What do they do when the builders of cities sleep and give them space for their very own, different kind of communication? How does this non-verbal, image-less model of communication relate to the hyper-verbal, hyper-illustrated, hyper-massaged communication of human inhabitants?

The performance TRANSMISSION makes the secret communication of plants visible and attempts to bring the urban parallel worlds of trees and humans into contact. It demonstrates the different communication networks that simultaneously span urban space, overlap and intertwine in an unplanned manner, thereby opening up a horizon for a non-verbal, as yet unknown form of communication transfer.