SPORES

Inspired by a news story about a fake tree, a camouflaged mobile phone mast designated as ‘Macrocell SUF0191', is disowned by a town in Suffolk where the residents campaigned to prevent the ‘tree’ being installed. The film imagines the antenna as a semi-autononmous organism which self-propogates, sending spores into the atmosphere.

“Greenleaf explores such themes as AI, man-made lifeforms, artificial landscape and GM crops. Spores succeeds in being at once ironic/detached and serious/engaged, postmodern art work and polemical socio-cultural comment. That’s the stock-in-trade of music producer/audio-visual artist, Paul Greenleaf, whose just-released Spores, with associated self-directed video, has an eye to our Anthropocene age—a prevailing cultural backdrop of self-learning machines, driverless cars and the Internet of Things. Greenleaf explores such themes as AI, man-made lifeforms, artificial landscape and GM crops.

Raised in rural Lincolnshire, where sky and land are equally dominant, has led to a lifelong fascination with landscape, and the inter-relation between music and image; just as ‘landscape photography relies on the constant dialogue between the land and sky; producing music is a very similar activity, it’s about creating a narrative and building a context […].’ 

Greenleaf assembles material from various sources for his audio-visual work, the four Spores pieces variously characterized by degenerative melodic loops filtered through tape hiss and vinyl crackle. Digging through layers of detailed noise reveals ambient synth drones and arpeggios, with tracks secreting samples of IKEA drawers, gas hobs, and Suffolk-song (i.e. local field recordings!). The video, inspired by a news story about a Suffolk town that rejected a ‘fake tree’ phone mast as a blot on the landscape and potential health risk, is a sur-/hyper-real re-imagining where it becomes a sentient semi-autonomous organism endowed with artificial intelligence that self-propagates, releasing spores into the atmosphere." - Alan Lockett, Igloo Magazine

Excerpt from film Spores, 2016

Spores (2016) projection onto blank postcard at Way Out East Gallery, University of East London