Walking by the art center, we heard some strange voices. Following them, we found a circle of trees with speakers.
They were telling a story - a strange story.
It was an adaptation of McBeth, told by trees.
Basically, the script was computer generated by feeding the MacBeth script and books about Everglades ecosystems into a learning machine. It generated blocks of text. The artists cut up the text and rearranged into a play. In the play, Lady Macbeth leads a tree-killing army into the forest. The three Weird Sisters and three talking trees conspire to stop her. She experiences an epiphany and becomes a tree herself.
They leave us with questions:
What does it mean for a tree to be an actor and not the scenery?
How do we give agency and voice to other forms of sentience?
How does listening to these new voices help us empathize with the non-human?
Standing in the center of a circle of trees, telling their side of a story was eerie. They didn't seem too friendly.
That sounds different.
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