Detailed statement of plans for utilizing time requested
Sasha Petrenko Professional Leave AY 25/26
Dear Committee Members,
This is my very first application for professional leave. Academic year 25/26 will be my eighth year of service at Western. I have created an audio version for this portion of my proposal, for your convenience but also because my practice is deeply rooted in sound. You can find a text based version below. Feel free to follow along. Thank you for taking the time to review my application.
Sasha Petrenko
Associate Professor Sculpture and Expanded Media
Department of Art and Art History
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Transcript:
Detailed statement of plans for utilizing time requested
Contents:
Creative Catalyst
Components
Timeline
My objective for this project is to conduct research, attend residencies and connect with artists, musicians, scientists, foresters, fire professionals, land managers and recreation planners working in forest restoration around Lake Tahoe and Santa Cruz in California and Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest in Washington, to produce 3 new music videos, that will exist within a larger multi-media installation that will recontextualize feedback and resonance, across the fields of science, music and human relationships, to identify and honor reparative action and resilience in our era of climate anxiety.
Creative Catalyst
“Queer ecopoetics methods, integrating story, art and performance with scientific measurements and data, can work like a log that racks up more floating wood into a jam, then reroutes the stream of science across levees that constrain from the world of collective feeling and grassroots politics.” Cleo Wolfle-Hazard, Underflow: Queer Trans Ecologies and River Justice, 2022.
It was only recently, after receiving the quote above in an email from colleague and collaborator, Andy Bunn, that I realized all this time, I’ve been practicing ecopoetics, a theory previously more associated with literature, but now, according to scholars like Benedictine Meillon, relating to “artistic media other than literature, such as dance, photography or cinema.” Ecopoetic’s trans-disciplinary approach to thinking, creating and being in relation to the natural world, refutes the dominant binary paradigm for a more liminal reality, a re-enchanted relationship with the more than human world. Moving beyond a study of “the language of nature and the nature of language,” Meillon theorizes that ecopoetics could, “reveal something of the actual capacities of humans, animals and plants, to emit sounds, songs, vibration and rhythms in harmony.”
Meillon’s idea that we might harmonize with our nonhuman neighbors allows for a less dismal view of our relationship to the planet. Harping on our past mistakes has not provided the sense of urgency we need to make lasting change. The work I want to make now will identify and honor how we do care and how repartive action can, not only produce results, but inspire.
I was a tape recorder kid. Lugging around an old Sony cassette recorder, capturing everything from the sound of water pouring into a glass, my mouth munching on lunch, imaginary news and original songs. Though I was formally trained as a sculptor, sound became and remains an integral part of my practice.
For almost 15 years I have been making interdisciplinary eco-art focusing on environmental science and the climate crisis. I’ve produced hikes, listening and vocalizing workshops, instructional videos, performative lectures, interactive sculptures and theatrical installations that can be as technologically complex as they are playful, earnest, and at times, awkward and absurd. I’ve observed that art moves people, and communicates scientific data on a visceral level, tapping into human emotions and imagination. Rather than lecture or chastise the public about our bad eco-habits, I make opportunities for collective, embodied experience, through touch, movement, moving image and sound, to bring a sense of intimacy and animacy to science’s stories about the natural world. I want people to physically feel their connection to the planet, to re-enter their bodies and be present.
When we listen, really listen, to a place, a person, we are uniquely present. Conversely, to not listen is to not be present. Sound has a quality, the ability to enter our ears, and our imaginations in a way that is both physical and emotional. We resonate, we feel vibrations, we move towards or away from sound, depending on what the body tells the brain. In our over visually saturated world, it could be argued that our optical sense has become desensitized. The same could be said of our ability to hear, but what sound art and music have the capacity to do is to remind us to listen.
For centuries, Western science has presented a dualistic or binary view of the separation between humans and nature. With each passing decade, as the effects of the climate crisis impact more cities, people and species, this idea of separation has cracked open to reveal an entangled world, where all human and more than human beings are inextricably connected. We are related to one another as we are to the soil, the plants, animals, insects, the oceans and the air that sustains us. As the perceived barriers between us erode, may we enter a new era of re-enchantment with the natural world.
Components
Energized by a sense of re-enchantment, with this new project, I will work through my ecofeminist rock opera heroine, who first appeared in Forest Time Fire. In Fire, our time-traveling dendrologist was filled with bleak predictions and angst towards her fellow humans who might never evolve beyond their extractive tendencies.
“What took you so long to find me / I’m almost already gone,” she sings over a rocking guitar. And, “What is left of your devices for measurement / did you plan to use the data for the task at hand / or was it just for the gathering as if we could go back / to when it was all that we needed / when it was all that we had.” But in this new song series, our lead singer appears transformed. Has she traveled back to a time before the tipping point, or forward to when we finally understand we cannot exist without a vibrant, healthy planet?
Embracing art and science and building on theories of ecopoetics, I will produce 3 music videos, and an interactive installation, consisting of 3 sculptures featuring capacitive sensors that trigger sound and video. My research will focus on real sites of active or recent habitat restoration, such as forest thinning, forest replanting, invasive species removal, re-meadowing, traditional ecological knowledge, prescribed burning, stream and drainage restoration and road decommissioning, in the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest in Washington, the Byrne-Milliron Forest in Santa Cruz, and the Tahoe National Forest, in California. I will embed myself into these sites and the communities that care for them as I’ve done before, in 2018 when I volunteered for the US Fish and Wildlife Service to spend 10 days on the remote Farallon Islands, and in 2018 - 2019, when I was an artist in Residence at Sagehen Field Station, UC Berkeley’s experimental forest, in Truckee, CA. I have selected these areas for my familiarity with and connection to them. These are sites of reenchantment, spaces where I felt the barriers between human and nonhuman dissolve. I hold with these sites a sort of resonance, having experienced a kind of feedback that spawned a new perspective on my place in the world.
The 3 sculptures, each approximately 8 feet tall and wide include a tetrahedron (Fire), an Octahedron (Air), and a cube (Earth), each constructed out of hand carved wooden rods and cast aluminum and bronze connectors. The cast elements are nearly finished for the whole series, though the rods must still be selected milled and carved. My aim is to work with native lumber from each site. The sculptures are based on platonic forms, which ancient scholars believed were the building blocks of our universe. Using Arduino coding and capacitive sensors, the sculptures will be sensitive to touch where ever I’ve placed a conductive element, like a metal connector or even a plant. Within a gallery, visitors will be able to touch parts of each sculpture to trigger audio and video that expands on or delves deeper into the subjects of the 3 music video. While the music videos will be part of the installation, they will also exist as works unto themselves so that my project is modular and can adapt to a range of dissemination opportunities.
I have defined the subject of my research, and described the deliverables, but it’s also important that I describe my process for this project. While both music and lyrics will be based on my experiences with each site and community, the song structures will also investigate two sonic phenomena: Resonance and Feedback.
Feedback and Resonance in society, sound and nature exhibit both complimentary and contradictory traits. Positive feedback in a social setting is desired. But when positive feedback occurs in an ecosystem, it can accelerate destructive processes like when our warming climate raises ocean water temperatures which accelerates sea ice melt that further heats up the atmosphere and the oceans, creating a lethal feedback loop. Negative feedback, like habitat restoration projects, work to stabilize a system. Reparative action can act like a deaccelerant to remove what fuels our climate crisis.
In music, feedback occurs when sound waves travel from a source, through a microphone, into and out of a speaker, back through the microphone, and then out through the speaker. The results can be aurally offensive, what any sound engineer would want to avoid. But when used creatively, most commonly with a guitar and amplifier, it can sound otherworldly and supernatural. There is a physicality to musical feedback as well in how it involves the human body and space. Guitar players that use feedback know where to stand, how to move, to illicit specific notes, tones and harmonics. My plan is to create sonic passages which employ feedback in the process of field recording. With a 400 watt powerbank, electric guitar, micrphones and a 15 watt tube amplifier, I will record the birds, the trees, wind, rocks and water, to produce feedback in the field.
Resonance occurs when an object vibrates in response to an external vibration that matches its own natural frequency. A famous example is the shattered wine glass that explodes when it’s natural frequency is amplified. But resonance is not necessarily destructive. To say you resonate with something, an idea, a work of art, a song, you are speaking to the way you feel moved, aligned, akin to the thing or being that has produced in us a sort of vibration that feels natural, innate and real. If one has experienced a collective hum, or sung in a choir, one may recall a vibration coming from within and without, that brings with it a visceral sense of interconnectivity.
These sonic passages will be vital to the quality of each music video, and reflect, if abstractly, the essense of a particular site. I’m curious how feedback is defined so differently, in human relations vs. ecology. Are we mistaken, and it’s negative feedback we need? And can reparative action act like resonance, expanding out, connecting communities of care as we vibrate together? How can we better understand resonance and feedback to exist in harmony with the more than human world?
TIMELINE
FALL 2024
Meet with Professor Bunn to begin to identify communities and sites (10/03) in Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. Meet with Anna Nakae, Western Washington Coordinator, National Forest Foundation (10/02) to learn about regional restoration projects. Continue to reach out to individual and institutional collaborators to secure partnerships and begin applying to residencies.
WINTER 2025
Professional leave notification 01/31/2025. Reach out to collaborators to confirm dates. Cast remaining connectors for sculptures.
SPRING 2025
Confirm site collaborations, apply to artist residencies.
SUMMER 2025
Fieldwork and Research Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. Preliminary fieldwork, research, meetings, with collaborators in Lake Tahoe and Santa Cruz, CA. Visiting Artist Workshops, Cabrillo College Extension, Aptos, CA. Apply to artist residencies.
FALL 2025
Focused fieldwork, research, documentation in Lake Tahoe, CA, Huntley Mill. Secure lumber for tetrahedron, octahedron, hexahedron (cube), begin milling process. Potential collaborations with National Forest Foundation, the Nature Conservancy, University of Nevada, Reno. Artist Residency Temescal Art Center, Oakland CA, (secured, 10/06 - 10/19/2025) Enter post-production on Mt Baker music video. Screening and lecture at TAC in Oakland. Apply to Wavefarm, NY, and Currents, the international art and technology fair, in New Mexico, 2026.
WINTER 2026
Focused research, fieldwork, documentation, Santa Cruz, CA. Intended collaborations with the Land Trust of Santa Cruz. Visiting Artist Workshops, Cabrillo College Extension, Aptos, CA. I will continue to document work in process for dissemination opportunities. Continue to visit Huntley Mill, Lake Tahoe, to document winter conditions in the forest. Artist Residency (intended) Great Basin National Park or Montello Artist Residency, NV.
SPRING - SUMMER 2026
Post production Tahoe and Santa Cruz music videos. Artist Residency (intended) Djerassi Artist Residency, Headlands Center for the Arts, or Wavefarm, NY, to complete installation and post-production. Complete documentation and produce initial public screenings and presentations. Exhibit at Currents, in June, 2026 (intended). Continue to seek out dissemination opportunities nationally and internationally.
FALL 2026
Secure exhibition/screening opportunity in Bellingham, WA to share research with collaeagues and students. Incorporate data visualization and data sonification projects and Sci-Art collaborations in ART 335: Intermedia and Public Art Installation. Draft and submit Professional Leave report.
Works Cited
Cleo Wölfle Hazard. Underflows. Feminist Technosciences, 2022.
Bénédicte Meillon. Ecopoetics of Reenchantment. Rowman & Littlefield, 2023.