Digitized Nature

Each tree shines brightly and resonates a tone when people or wild animals approach it. The surrounding trees respond one after another, continuously transmitting the light and tone.

The trees also resonate with surrounding artworks, creating a continuous flow of light and tone with each other. If a wave of light approaches from the depths of the trees, it signifies the presence of people or wild animals there. The artwork space is transformed by the body, the behavior of others and wild animals, as well as the surrounding artworks, making the people and the environment a part of the work.

This artwork is part of the Digitized Nature art project. Digitized Nature is an attempt to explore how nature can become art as it is, without destroying it.

The shapes, textures, and changes of the forest trees themselves inherently contain a long period of time, the continuity of life, and relationships with the ecosystem. While a tree itself is part of an ecosystem, it also hosts life on its surface and inside, forming an ecosystem of its own. Unlike physical objects made by humans, the contours of its existence are ambiguous.

By layering non-physical materials such as sensing, networks, light, and sound onto these trees, the trees, remaining as they are, respond to each other and form a single continuous field as a collective. This is not an attempt by humans to sculpt nature as a material, but an attempt for the trees, shaped over a long period of time and within the ecosystem, to rise up as a resonating collective sculpture just as they are.

Here, humans are not the only ones who change the artwork. The body, others, wild animals, the environment, trees, and surrounding artworks are all connected to the same ecosystem-like responsive field. Individual trees do not exist independently as a single completed entity, but continue to exist within relationships. People do not just look at the artwork; they enter into the resonance of the trees and sense the presence of others, wild animals, and the environment through the continuity of light and sound.

This structure presents nature not as an object outside of the artwork, but as an ecosystem-like field that changes together with people and the environment.