Trees silently watch generations of society pass. On average, they live about 300 years, but Earth’s oldest tree, Methuselah, has stood among California’s White Mountains for nearly 5,000.
In “Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology: Trees, Time, and Technology,” a new installation by Bay Area creative couple Ken Goldberg and Tiffany Shlain, the artists juxtapose the timeless, organic intelligence of trees alongside products of human ingenuity. On view at Los Angeles’s Skirball Center through March 2, 2025, the exhibition is part of the Getty Museum’s “PST ART: Art and Science Collide” initiative. Stars like Diane Von Furstenberg, Nadya Tolokonnikova, and Kristen Bell made appearances opening night.
“It's definitely the biggest undertaking we have done together,” Shlain remarks. Goldberg is an artist and professor at the University of California at Berkeley; Shlain is an artist, author, and creator of the Webby awards. They met in 1997 at a talk by Shlain’s father, who composed the masterful book Art and Physics. In the decades since, they’ve co-written numerous films, and occasionally collaborate on art projects. Their latest endeavor required three years of research and craftsmanship.
“Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology” opens on an unruly chunk of naturally felled eucalyptus. Shlain started emblazoning tree slices with themed timelines during the pandemic, but the Tree of Knowledge, 2024, marks her first 3-D sculptural work in the series. Five more wall-mounted slices encircle that piece, all bearing distinct timelines coordinated along their concentric rings.
A hefty cross-section of elderwood titled If We Lose Ourselves, 2024, documents the evolving ways humanity has recorded information, from the invention of writing in Sumer and Egypt around 3200 B.C.E. through the advent of ChatGPT in San Francisco during 2022. When Goldberg and Shlain received the seven-foot-tall slice of redwood that holds the mathematical timeline on Abstract Expressions, 2024, they were at first distraught to notice the specimen had incurred three harsh slash marks at the lumber yard. They quickly realized it made the slice look somewhat geometric. Every date along its emanating rings indicates the discovery of a new mathematical formula, memorialized solely in equation notation.
Detail after detail guides guests around the other side of Tree of Knowledge, which presents 160 archetypal human queries written with pyrography across swirling clusters. “Before ideas become knowledge, you have to wrestle with the ideas and the questions,” Shlain says of the symbolism. “You come to the front, and it's this smooth surface with all the burned questions. It looks quite beautiful, like a brain or a hand or a flower.” They devised its content over long strolls. “We co-wrote the tree rings, like we co-wrote the movies,” she continues.
Goldberg took the lead on the show’s two A.I. components. A four-minute video, titled Speculation, Like Nature, Abhors a Vacuum, replaces the buildings in Ed Ruscha's photographic project “Streets of Los Angeles” with views from Google’s open-source Auto Arborist Dataset. Online, Los Angeles locals can plug in data about their favorite tree, and receive an idealized digital portrait of it in return.
Overall, “Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology” amasses conversation starters. Shlain heard recently that one of her collectors is launching a discussion series at her house using one of her tree-ring sculptures as the centerpiece. Programming at the Skirball, meanwhile, will end with a Frieze LA frenzy.
For a tree, the time between here and there wouldn’t even make half a ring.
