Making the Podcast 'Talking with Trees'
My skill sharing during the September 2025 retreat consisted of showing the process of creating an episode for the podcast 'Talking with Trees', which I have maintained as an art project on SoundCloud since 2022.
I began by showing the site where, as part of the project 'Joining Junipers', I recorded the most recent talk with a juniper in Stockholm, with a video camera on a tripod and a microphone in the phone in my hand. Screenshots from the editing process show how I combine the video and the sound recording, adjust their volume, and export the combination as a video work and a separate sound file. That sound file I then combine in a sound editor with a pre-recorded intro to the podcast as well as an outro or brief ending, both of which are always the same.
The sound file or podcast episode thus created is then uploaded on SoundCloud together with an image captured from the video and an updated standard description with a link to the Research Catalogue (RC) online. It is also added to a playlist based on which juniper I talked to and which language I used. For the page on the RC, I add two video stills, the video in low resolution, a transcript of the spoken text (the recording dictated to word and corrected) and a translation of the text into English (made with a translator program and corrected). Lastly, I distribute a link to the episode on social media. The process with all the episodes is archived both on the RC:
See Joining Junipers: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/3310043/3310044
And as a podcast, see Talking with Trees: https://soundcloud.com/user-90370389
This was a technical sharing, showing the tools I use and how I use them, and it did not include any discussion on why talk with trees in the first place. Here I can briefly note that I began by writing letters to trees next to the trees, addressing the trees in writing, letting them influence my thoughts in that way. To talk to the trees directly was a step towards performance art, the live moment of creating something that cannot be undone or adjusted afterwards, because the conversation takes place in real time.
My main concern has been how to develop ways of recognizing and engaging with the subjectivity of life forms such as trees, which we tend to consider as wholly ‘other’. How to develop acts of thinking, reflecting, pondering or speaking with trees, next to them or in some form of collaboration with them. I did not use the idea of sentience but took it somehow as a given. All living beings must be sentient to be able to respond to and thrive in their circumstances.
An example of a video (not a podcast episode, though) discussing sentience and during the retreat is here: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/3310043/3849752