Brainstorm Blog : Stihlback Mountain

“From ashes we fall, to ashes we rise” — Peter Chainsaw, 2025

This project is inspired by a close friend’s time leading a trail restoration crew in the Montana wilderness. For months, he used chainsaws to clear paths and protect the environment—a process of using heavy machinery to preserve natural beauty. Stihlback Mountain aims to capture this tension between the rugged, physical work of the forest and the fragile, digital world of art.

I plan to use various glitch techniques to "manipulate the veil" of nature. By applying datamoshing and fake glitcheffects to footage of the mountains, I want to suggest that our reality might be a simulation or a "matrix." Using Hydra, a live-coding software, I will transform organic forest textures into flickering, rhythmic patterns of code. This represents the idea that under the surface of the trees and soil, there is a complex system waiting to be rewritten.

Ultimately, the goal is to show that nature and technology are more connected than they seem. The "ashes" in the title refer to both the literal debris of the forest floor and the digital fragments of a corrupted file. By breaking down these images, I am exploring how we perceive the world around us and whether our "restoration" of nature is just an attempt to fix a glitch in our own reality.

(writing assisted by Gemini)