DIRECTIONS
UC Santa Cruz Arboretum and Botanic Garden is located on High Street between the main campus entrance and the west entrance. Detailed driving directions can be found here. 

HOURS AND ADMISSION

Monday CLOSED
Tuesday- Friday 12 – 5 p.m.
Saturday- Sunday 10 – 5 p.m

Admission to FOREST is included in a visit to the Arboretum and Botanic Garden. Admission is $5.00 ($2.00 for children, free to Friend’s Members, volunteers, and UCSC students.) More information can be found here. 

To experience the piece, you follow a path through a densely forested redwood grove. Branches crunch under your feet until you reach a small clearing populated by tree stumps. As you sit down, the sounds of rustling trees, crackling branches, and bird calls subtly intensify. An airplane passes overhead. Someone laughs. It is nearly impossible to determine which sounds are coming from a recording and which sounds are live. When machine guns begin to fire and an explosion detonates, the eeriness of the experience becomes laced with quickly amplifying uneasiness. An indeterminate history merges with the present, filled with both horrors and the sublime, and becomes an audible presence in the shadowy forest.

As Gregory Volk wrote in Art in America , “A remarkable thing about Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s utterly captivating sound installation is how it blurs distinctions between site and art. You enter a clearing in the forest, sit down on a wooden stump, and simply listen. Cardiff and Bures Miller’s work incorporates the actual forest into an audio composition emitted from more than thirty speakers. Sometimes there is a near synchronicity of natural and mediated sounds, and it’s tough to discern what is live and what is recorded…. In turn frightening and deeply touching, ominous and serene, Cardiff and Bures Miller’s forest soundscape is a wonder.”(1) 

FOREST (for a thousand years…) at the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum and Botanic Garden has been generously sponsored by the Nion McEvoy Family Trust of the San Francisco Community Foundation, Wanda Kownacki, Rowland and Pat Rebele, and annual donors to the Institute of the Arts and Sciences.

1. Gregory Volk, A Walk in the dOCUMENTA Park, Art in America, June 15, 2012.​

This event is collaboratively produced and sponsored by the Institute of Arts and Sciences Visualizing Abolition public scholarship initiative and the UC Santa Cruz Art Department, Environmental Art and Social Practice (EASP) M.F.A. degree program, the Arts Research Institute, and Reciprocal Ecologies.