MOVING FOREST
AKA the CASTLE

concept
prelude
performance
conference
spines
threads
acts

Moving Forest 2008 Transmediale.08. Berlin.
London workshop 2011

Organization & Support
now@movingforest.net

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Fear not, till Birnam wood Do come to Dunsinane. - Macbeth, Shakespeare

How can a forest move? It must be a vision. When the forest moves, can it still be tied down? - 500 slogans, Matthew Fuller

The opposition is AMONG us. The central is AMONG us. Urban Jungle. Digital Forest. Multitude. Age of Empire. Liquid Architecture. Flash Mob. Swarm manoeuver. Urban warfare. Moving Forest locatess itself at any given decayed urbanscape and plots an urban renewal with DIY take over. The SpiderWeb forest is now the DeepWeb forest of social networked space - both virtual and urban. Inside the castle, a revolt manifested by arrow downpour; outside the castle, the resistance on the move with electronic branches. Each camouflaged tree branch is now a self-powered transmitter with its stick-out antenna. The long march towards the imaginary castle maps the city's public wifi airspace. Revolt and insurgency from within and out orchestrates a sonic performance with multiple sound input/output - code/de/code. Moving Forest, updated with wireless and mobile technology, reflects upon the current net culture practice in digital commons, locative media, open system and distributed social networks. The orchestration merges internal and external, local and remote networked sonicscapes. Ultimately, Moving Forest renders Spider Web's final 12 minutes film sequence in variations and deviation. - Shu Lea Cheang

Prelude/pre-scene/pre-zero: A transition from the filmed scene (a section of the Kurosawa film Throne of Blood inspired by the story and language of Macbeth) into another time and space: the city as conspiratorial forest with an imaginary central castle (immediate reference Kafka The Castle). Mobile city, Maxwell City (the four equations pointing towards the presence of electromagnetic [EM] phenomena and a certain play with light - pink light and again references, conspiracy theory is all about making connections, Philip K Dick - cross modulation with some other information source - cold war or of alien origin), invisible twin or ghost city of these phenomena which suggest an alternative architecture to be moved through, an alternative (real) physics and a question itself of time and space (light, that EM particle, the luminiferous aether). A transition from the filmed scene into city-wide action and mobile software acts or process; being in that outside (outside the castle), with a device which possesses a locked code interior. Again, we return to a grand drama of interface (code as a hiding/world as interface). Slowly underscored by the image of a ruined city (Berlin): paranoiac wanderings incensed by devices (device also as logo/initials: "rocketman was here"). - Martin Howse