After the workshop at Stanford one of the students offered to bring me to the hotel in San Francisco.
It’s about 40 minutes travel. In the car he asked me if I’ve seen the Redwood. Not if I’ve been there but if I’ve seen it. I said that I’m too tired. He suddenly flushed red and said that I’ve just got to go there. So he turned off the highway. Quite unexpectedly stubborn for an American…
I rarely visit any woods. I’m always sad there and it is somehow cramped. But the Redwood, it’s something entirely different. They are also known as Mammoth trees. We were walking somewhere rather fast and he spoke something looking at his feet. He said nothing new, nothing new could I hear but something unusual was going on.
All his thoughts about technology development, about the destiny of the Father of Internet seemed to me rather flat for a Stanford student.
He tried to pull me into discussion. I suspected an attempt to show off a little bit.
“Everyone I know in Stanford wants to change the world.” I answered that I really want to keep the world as it is, so we’re on different paths. We laughed.
He brought me to a cut of a tree trunk and I couldn’t believe my eyes: the tree must have been around 2500 years old! And some of the annual rings were marked and signed.
The student went on talking and I was reading… 1347, Europe’s Black Death… “We’ve got a club, called The Cell. There are really selected brains. We try to analyze the moment when inventions or discoveries or rather presentiments of an invention can be captured by other people. Or even more precisely when some kind of an invention’s carrier frequency emerges and is available for scanning, since at that very moment… how should I explain it…” – 1492, Columbus arrives to the New World – “ … it’s not a stealing, it’s much more complex… best of the best are working here” – hmm, if it’s allowed to smoke a cigarette here in the woods… – “…we’re moving the world here. And another moment which is particularly exciting is when an invention becomes destructive and may come into unfriendly hands…” – Declaration of Independence is signed, 1776 – “another project I’m working on at The Cell is a software development, the software invoking an enmity to other software in one’s mind… a sort of shady copy of the original software but actually quite sophisticated… ” – Gold Rush, 1848 – “one of the tasks is an integration of elements which irritate a human biosystem via PC and arouse a consequent rejection, an inability to perceive information without additional effort…”
At the hotel’s doors he said to me that he’s always talking that much in the Wood because he hears the voices of the Redwood if he’s silent.
“And what do the voices say?”
“Pretty much the same but quite understandable and clear, and just like it happened yesterday. It’s dangerous. Thank you once again for your Harlequin. Have a good night.”
The Black Dance from the previous news is the first outline of the new DEREVO project MEPHISTO WALTZ. Scenic design by Maxim Isaev (AKHE). In May Lena, Tanya, Alisa and Anton presented this work at the Meta Theatre of Mikhail Chemiakin in France.
The main character of the performance was born there – The Scarecrow (you will not see him on any photo).
Text: Anton Adasinskiy
English text editor: Jennifer Williams
Photo: Elena Yarovaya, Maxim Isaev, Mikhail Chemiakin
Photo design: Elena Yarovaya
