Cascade Experiment

The Growth, Conservation and Cultivation of An Autoethnographic Woodland - 
 

“[...]
Because truths we don’t suspect have a hard time
making themselves felt, as when thirteen species
of whiptail lizards composed entirely of females
stay undiscovered due to bias
against such things existing,
we have to meet the universe halfway.
Nothing will unfold for us unless we move toward what
looks to us like nothing: faith is a cascade.
[...]” - The Cascade Experiment by Alice Fulton

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‘Cascade Experiment’ is an Autoethnographic research based project which, deriving from a personal experience in a wheelchair, explores the relationships between non-normative embodiment, technology and perception within the landscape – concluding with the proposal of a new accessible woodland within the Ashdown Forest. The design project runs in parallel to my dissertation which used an Autoethnographic methodology to analyse the ontological entanglement between the body (self) and tool (wheelchair) in forming new epistemological understandings of landscape.

 

Through writing and digital reconstruction – the project culminates in a speculative film in which a semi-autonomous silvicultural infrastructure facilitates the expansion of an isolated woodland environment. Using varying scales of space and time, the film oscillates between the first person perspective of ground conditions navigated via the wheelchair, to the wide scale speculation of the woodland intervention. Inspired by Tim Ingold’s concept of the Taskscape the woodland infrastructure is animated by a series of devices which grow, curate, conserve, observe and expand the original forest Clump in which the study took place, allowing a mediation between the two organic states of the body and landscape – in order to understand the consequences of non-normative embodiment on spatial perception.