LOS ANGELES — Historic Knowledge for a Future Ecology: Timber, Time, and Know-how on the Skirball Cultural Heart is a mind-bending set up and studying library by the Bay Space artist duo Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg. Offered along with the Getty’s PST ART initiative, Artwork & Science Collide, the exhibition pays homage to the continuing human quest for data by documenting its evolution via a collection of timelines inscribed over the rings of fallen tree fragments, culled from salvage yards, utilizing the age-old strategy of pyrography (wooden burning). These timelines handle the histories of such subjects as data itself, California bushes, science, and Judaism.
On the core of set up stands “Tree of Knowledge,” a sculpture crafted from a tree that’s rugged on one facet within the method of an Ursula von Rydingsvard paintings. On the opposite facet, a smoother floor is etched with 160 questions organized into six classes (thoughts, humanities, society, sciences, beliefs, and philosophy). They start on the heart with easy queries that early Homo sapiens may need requested, reminiscent of “Why do I exist?” and “Can we create fire?” As they unfold outward, the questions turn out to be extra complicated and related — as an illustration, “How will we live in a changing climate?”
Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg, “DendroJudaeology: A Timeline of the Jewish People” (2024), reclaimed poplar wooden sculpture, 62 inches diameter x 3 inches depth (157.48 x 7.62 cm)
Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg, “DendroJudaeology: A Timeline of the Jewish People,” element
One of the crucial intriguing tree sculptures is “Abstract Expression,” which paperwork the evolution of equations from Pythagoras to ChatGPT. As a result of the sample of nicks within the wooden on the heart reminded the artists of a query mark and the spiral from Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” splendid proportions diagram, they left this space unarticulated. “DendroJudaelology: A Timeline of the Jewish People” consists of the same old citations, such because the story of Moses and the Holocaust, but additionally lists popular culture occasions like Marilyn Monroe’s conversion to Judaism and the field workplace file of “Fiddler on the Roof.”
Taking their documentation into the current, Shlain and Goldberg created a video homage to Ed Ruscha’s “Every Building on the Sunset Strip.” The imagery, created by feeding photographs from Google Maps and Google Earth into AI, maps the bushes alongside 4 main LA thoroughfares. A participatory undertaking associated to this invitations guests to create a tree tribute by taking a tape measure residence to measure a favourite tree, after which {photograph} it up shut and from afar. The tree’s zip code, knowledge, and photographs are then submitted to a web site and AI will decide the tree’s age, write a quick description of its location and historical past, and create a pristine idealized picture of it, all of which may be considered in a web based gallery. Utilizing the newest expertise, the artists cleverly lengthen the Jewish customized of honoring family members by planting bushes to celebrating bushes themselves inside the digital panorama of the World Huge Net.
Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg, “Speculation, Like Nature, Abhors a Vacuum” (2024), video, 4:40 minutes
Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg, “Abstract Expression” (2024), reclaimed redwood sculpture, 82 inches diameter x 3 inches depth (208.28 x 7.62 cm)
Tiffany Shlain and Ken Goldberg, “Abstract Expression,” element 
“Tree #30” from Seeing the Forest: Gallery of Private Tree Tributes, 2024. AI generated picture of a Jacaranda mimosifolia tree, based mostly on measurements and images taken by the creator of a tree in his neighborhood and submitted to the web site ancientwisdom.artwork.
Historic Knowledge for a Future Ecology: Timber, Time, and Know-how continues on the Skirball Cultural Heart (2701 North Sepulveda Boulevard, Bel Air, Los Angeles) via March 2, 2025. The exhibition was co-curated by Affiliate Curator Vicki Phung Smith and Visitor Curator Selma Holo.
