2021 McKnight Visual Artist Fellow: Ben Moren

This is the fourth in a series of articles profiling the seven distinguished artists chosen as 2021 McKnight Fellows in Visual Arts, a grant program for mid-career artists in Minnesota that is administered by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. The 2021 cohort includes David Bowen, Mara Duvra, Ben Moren, Rotem Tamir, Dyani White Hawk, and Dream The Combine (Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers).

As their two-year fellowship comes to a close, five of the artists will be participating in an upcoming Discussion Series as well:

• Jasmine Wahi in conversation with Rotem Tamir, David Bowen, and Mara Duvra on Thursday, April 6, 6:30 pm at Mia. 
• Gregory Volk in conversation with Ben Moren and Dyani White Hawk on Thursday, April 20, 6:30 pm at Mia. 

 

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Photo by Rik Sferra

 

In 1882, a group of surveyors casing Minnesota for lumber made a mistake. They missed a spot – a 40-acre patch of pines northwest of Grand Rapids, where they accidentally plotted a nearby lake just a little too large on their maps. As the rest of the state’s old growth forests were clearcut, that simple error saved those trees, leaving them standing to this day as a lonely relic of the wilderness that was.

140 years later, Ben Moren visited the same spot, now known as the Lost Forty Scientific and Natural Area, and decided to do a survey of his own. With funding from the Minnesota State Arts Board, Moren and an assistant spent four days camping in the forest, taking thousands and thousands of photos. The photographs were only a means to an end, though: Moren created them specifically to be a massive data set on which an AI image generator could be trained. The end result of this process is an altogether new batch of imagery: imaginary trees styled after Moren's photos of the real ones — an endless array of pixels as pine trees titled Reference Ecosystem: Lost 40. “My original idea coming into the project was, if I can generate an artificial tree for every tree that was cut, then this can be like a reclamation process,” he says.

Over the course of those four days, however, his feelings about the project became more muddled, more complicated. For Moren, an avid outdoorsman who grew up in Minnesota, the experience was altogether unsettling — unsavory, even. 

“We worked 9am to 7pm every day straight, just taking images for hours and hours,” he recalls. “It’s draining, and it starts to feel gross. It starts to feel exploitative, like you're in this beautiful space and you’re just in there taking.” 

They were pushing the motto “Take only pictures, leave only footprints” to its limit, connecting the dots between an entire extractive industry and a single person in the woods. Interestingly, of course, all of those photos of all of those trees will likely never see the light of day. They exist only in the shadows of these facsimiles — this infinite trove of wholly new, nonexistent pine trees. An entire, uncanny forest. 

 

Reference Ecosystem: Lost 40 , 2021. Custom Lost40 Dataset, StyleGAN2, Archival Inkjet Prints, 12"x12", series of 75 selections, unlimited image set possible.

 

Thin trunks stare out at us face-to-face, their crusty gray bark just a little too shiny, a little too soft and saturated — a little too… something. The images look off, just barely unnatural enough to set off a viewer’s alarm bells. The same is true as you look up to the canopy: close but no cigar. They’ve been clipped and tucked in odd spots, branches splintering off like the nine-fingered hands of so many other AI-generated images we see today. Some of the machine-learned images break down completely, coming out chopped up and unrecognizable. The digital artifacts take over, and whatever illusion was left collapses.

“I feel like it’s the 100,000% most unresolved thing I’ve ever made,” Moren says. “I have so many questions about that project; I have so many mixed feelings about it. It’s changed my relationship to observation, the environment, and technology.” 

In an essay for MNArtists, writer Everest Pipkin describes the project in funereal terms, as a living wake for the last of the Minnesota giants — not only looking back at the clearcutting of Minnesota’s lumberjack heyday but forward, as well, to the potential collapse of our forests due to climate change. Without major reductions in CO₂ emissions, studies suggest, Minnesota's forests will recede, and the entire state could transition into a prairie biome in as little as fifty years. Describing Reference Ecosystem’s artificial forest, Pipkin writes: “Trained on images of the forest in knowing anticipation of its loss, the fossil here precedes the body, making a shape a felled tree can fall into. They’re beautiful images, truly, mysterious and compelling. But they are also deeply sad, in the way[…] an image created of a subject that is gone, or will soon be gone, can never replace what is lost.”

And so the project takes on another level of unease, encompassing both the disturbingly unreal and the depressingly all-too-real at the same time — both looking ahead to a dystopian future. Still, the artwork itself maintains a certain level-headedness, not dissolving into panic or outrage but instead keeping the patient resolve of an observer. Moren’s work sits comfortably, almost eagerly, with disquietude. This calm dedication to uneasy but unblinking observation is a thread through all of his work, going back over a decade to his early experimentations with video work.

 

Ag Súil Anuas Ar Cappagh Na Mhalla | Walking down Cappanawalla, 2009. Performance for video, 07:11.

 

In a 2009 video, made during a study abroad program in Ireland, Moren can be seen emerging from a pile of large, gray stones and simply going for a walk through the landscape, slowly clambering up a rocky hillside. But, as with the Reference Ecosystem images, you can tell immediately that something isn’t right: his hair sways unnaturally, his footsteps fall at a strange rhythm. It’s as though he's trudging through the uncanny valley itself — an awkward and unnerving performance made quite simply by walking backwards and then playing the video in reverse.

“I was really struggling with being in a kind of capital A fine arts program, where there's a lot of drawing and painting folks there,” he says of the program. “I didn't really know what I was supposed to do. So one day, I just grabbed a friend of mine and was like, Alright, I'm gonna go try to do this and engage with the environment, engage with time, in a strange way. Really test my body awareness.”

It was the first of many Body Positions videos, which found the artist placing himself at odds with the wilderness. He can be seen tromping through the landscape backwards, camouflaging himself in makeshift ghillie suits, and floating down a river — all performed with perfect calm before a static camera. All art is an artifact of some experience, whether the mark of a pencil, the modeling of clay, or the performance in a space, and for a time, Moren put his literal, bodily experiences at the center of his work. 

In 2014’s Floating Position, for instance, five flat-screen TVs sit in a row on the gallery floor, each showing a segment of a river shot by drone from a bird’s-eye-view. Slowly, the artist comes into view, floating along with the current, fully clothed as though straight from the office, and with his legs held together like a little crucifix Christ. As his body passes from one monitor to the other, he shifts left or right on the screen, not popping out exactly where you might expect. After he disappears beyond the fifth screen, here he comes again on the first. It’s an intervention in nature that plays with our place within it: a piece of human jetsam fully immersed, going with the flow, and experienced by the audience entirely through tech.

 

Floating Position (Overview), 2016. Performance for video, custom electronics, custom software, 5 televisions, infinite loop.

 

“I don't really have a studio practice that's like a sketchbook practice, or an internal processing, creative practice,” he says. “The closest thing that I have to that is tool building, which is something that I do a lot of. I'll build prototype circuits and stuff like that. I do a lot of coding behind the scenes of all this, like with those endlessly looping videos. There's a really complex piece of software behind some of those, but that's not what the work is about at all. But it really informs the kind of aesthetic and the experience of the work really dramatically.”

Over time, Moren’s body has disappeared from his work, staying behind the camera as the outdoors have taken center stage. The audience’s body, however, remains engaged. In 2018, Moren developed the White Oak Listener, a leaf-shaped hearing device that the public is invited to use at Silverwood Park, amplifying the sounds of the park’s oak savanna. That same year, he installed Watercourse, a long, looping video of a river projected across a large-scale, eight-sided structure, turning the flowing water into a never-ending, natural Möbius strip. To get the full effect, viewers had to physically move around the piece, themselves flowing like debris downriver.

“The outdoor movement is obviously booming at the moment, people camping and hiking and just trying to get outside,” Moren says, “but I think there is a lot of stuff that's super passive in that space. You're gonna go hike and just follow the trail and go up and go down and get the view and then leave. And there's nothing wrong with that; I think everybody should get outside as much as you can. But if the same person went to the trail, and they took one step into the woods and then just spent the entire time there, really paying attention to every little thing that's going on, what kind of experience would that give everybody? You know, it's a perspective shifting question.”

The same could perhaps be said about an art gallery, as well. Maybe even a good meal, or a conversation with a loved one — any moment that can be paused, stretched out, and inspected. Anything to which we can pay the most compassionate (and rewarding) sum: more attention.

“I think that the fundamental skill of artists is making space for this kind of deep observational standpoint to happen, and whether you're putting a sculpture in front of somebody and asking them to do it with this object, or you're creating an immersive experience for somebody, that’s the thing for me.”

 

White Oak Listener, 2018. Electronics, custom printed circuit board, 3.5" x 6" x 1.5".

 

While we’re sitting at his kitchen table, Moren opens up a small Pelican case he’s been taking with him on recent camping trips. After talking about machine-learning networks and video looping software for an hour, I am surprised to see him reveal a 16mm Russian battlefield camera from the 1980s — about as analog a tool as you can get. Moren has been using it to film a new project, Breathing Wilderness, which continues his interest in documenting the North Woods while subtly bringing his own body back into the equation.

The camera features a dial for frame-rate that fluctuates between 8 and 48 frames per second. Moren has been using it to shoot long-duration shots of lakeside vistas and close-ups of saplings, adjusting the dial in time with his breath. As he exhales, he increases the film’s frame-rate; as he inhales, he returns to a normal speed. And repeat. And repeat. And repeat. Once developed, he overdubs the footage with the sound of heavy breathing, recorded in time with the film. The problem is, with a faster frame-rate, the exhales take longer than the inhales, again stretching and distorting reality. “I found when I showed this, people would start trying to breathe with it. And it's like, deeply uncomfortable.”

It’s undeniably creepy, as well, like the filmmaker — and, by extension, the viewer — is some kind of mouth-breathing lurker staring daggers at Mother Nature, like Michael Myers on vacation in the Boundary Waters. As with the Lost Forty, Moren is wrestling with observation, with the way technology — or, more broadly, modernity — recasts us as voyeurs in our own home. Behind the camera, we stand at a distance, hiding behind the bushes, trying to extract some use or some experience from this world before it’s gone. “I like the idea that this is deeply uncomfortable, because to me, these spaces are going away. There's a sense of urgency or discomfort in that gesture in and of itself.”

Again, apprehension and foreboding come up, but there's also a serious sense of humor here. Moren’s work, in its conception and its execution, is fundamentally playful. He is out in the woods throwing green-screen fabric over little trees and recording synth music using the sounds of a frozen lake. Experimenting with cutting-edge technology and out-of-date old relics, generating fake pine trees and engineering metal oak leaves. There’s a dry humor running throughout, and though the work centers our bodies, the spectacle of our human senses, and the consequences of our human actions, its true subject is everything else — the "real" world, a place much bigger and older than we can imagine. Like taking a step off the trail, shifting perspectives can do us some good. “Otherwise,” Moren says, “it's just doom and gloom all day long. And it may feel like that in this moment. But we also approach this planet from a super human-centered space.”

We’re stuck in these bodies, but the rest of the planet sure isn’t, though it does have to suffer our follies all the same. The old riddle asks, if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound? The answer is yes, of course; the laws of physics do not exist only for our amusement. In the case of the North Woods, however, there are plenty of us around to hear it — the sound of entire forests beginning to fall, if only we'd listen. ◼︎

 

Horizon (Burntside), 2021. Video, field recording, 47:27.

 

To see more of Ben Moren's work, visit his website or follow him on Instagram @bmoren.

There will be a book release event for Moren's new book Reference Ecosystem: Lost 40 at Midway Contemporary Art Library on April 15, 3 – 5pm.