Treaty Oak
The Treaty Oaks tree is said to be the last remaining of a grove of 14 oak trees that mark the spot where the founder of Austin, Texas made land negotiations with the Indigenous peoples living there. The Tree is sanctified and protected in a small park, enclosed by a stone wall and a chain fence in the center of the city, with a plaque describing its history. My interest in this tree starts from this spatial configuration – considering how this tree and its history, considered a 'nature' worth preserving, has been nested within the confines and structures of the city.
The boundaries that Austin has imposed on the tree do not know the spread of its roots or its history. This project questions how the confinement of recognition, preservation, and respect to particular bounded locations – or particular images – troubles our ability to practice an acknowledgement of the relationality and resonance of more-than-human agents and their histories in our urban landscapes.
This movie is made from google earth footage, 360 video footage of the tree, and field recordings made under the tree. It layers images from different scales of viewership, from the god-like view of Google Earth to the vantage point of sitting underneath the tree atop its roots. This is an attempt to reveal the failure of Google Earth to wholly represent the tree (or any place), the existence of multiple perspectives, and the textures of embodied experience of place. The glitchy, flickering style of the movie aims to play with the visibility of the interface – making present the screen, the software, and the networks we engage in acts of digital viewership.
