Last weekend I went up to the Bronx for the first time in years. I made my way up to the Grand Concourse, a beautiful roadway that used to house largely Jews and other Eastern European immigrants in immense tudor style apartment buildings. I chose a stretch of the museum around a small park off the concourse. Initially i had difficulty finding the trees. The placards were small and on the ground and not particularly intuitive to find. Even though I had a map on my phone, I spent a good twenty minutes searching for the first tree.
I dialed in and selected the extension and on my rickety speaker phone, I heard the story of a boy who went to the high school across the street and his relationship with this tree he had passed. I heard other stories, stories of how their used to be few trees here, of local politicians and immigrants. I wanted the stories to be more personal about specific trees but they seemed to be sort of arbitrary. “I pass this tree on the way to work.”
I liked the premise of the interaction but I didn’t feel as moved as I wanted to feel. I felt like the phone in aspect didn’t make the most of the interactive capacity of mobile phone technology. Also, it made it less accessible to folks without mobile phones. I think tech savvy folks privileged to have these gadgets can take for granted that plenty of people still can not afford the luxury of a cell phone. I did, however, encounter non-ITP students moving through the exhibition. I also spoke to people in the park when they inquired as to what I was doing. My friend and I were listening to the narratives on speaker phone and I explained that each tree had a story and you could all in and listen. They certainly seemed inquisitive. The premise had a lot of potential but I think building in sound systems or selecting more complex, relevant narratives would have been more appealing. Granted, a sound system for each tree would have been immensely expensive but perhaps the costs could have been shuffled around by using less trees, for example.
Check out my videos from the Tree Museum: