Virtual Forest Walk is born out of the practice of walking in nature. I am tickled by the hundreds of videos on Youtube of first-person, point-of-view videos of walking through nature at varying levels of resolution and quality. I am moved by our attempts to be in communion with nature mediated through screens and technology. Using projection, machine generated white noise, and shadow, I performed a series of virtual forest walks and wrote a score that both describes my somatic experience and invites the viewer to reflect on their relationship to the body while embodying a forest. The above iteration of Virtual Forest Walk is a video compilation of in-camera performance, guided meditation, and found footage in a low-tech immersive installation that prompts the viewer to perform a virtual forest walk. This video installation was my first attempt at experimenting with blending performance, video, documentation, and objects to evoke the feelings and desires of my live performances without being mired by the shortcomings of straight picture and video documentation.

Nature is not only out there, it is also in here. It is in our screens and plastics. It is mined and pumped out of the earth, processed, consumed. It is in particulates found in our bodies and waters, air, bloodstreams, raining down from the sky, and dissolving back into the earth.