This piece, was last on view at the Albuquerque Museum ISEA2012 Machine Wilderness exhibit. It evolved from my desire to explore data visualization and video mapping technologies to create an immersive contemplative space around the theme of trees. This piece was created in collaboration with creative coder and sound designer, Alessandro Saccoia. The goal was to use algorithms that mimic natural randomness, chaos and order, and focus on visualizing the essence of a tree, as opposed to a realistic interpretation of a tree.

By integrating data mining from social networks and text messaging, people participate in the creation of the branches and see their message appear on the wall along with others being mined in real time.  The audience could send a text message and see their message appear on the wall with a branch. Messages coming in from Twitter contain the designated key words (i.e. trees, nature rights), interspaced with archived inspirational quotes about nature gathered from the web, and the articles from the Universal Declaration of Nature Rights, signed into law in Ecuador for the first time. The whole experience was designed to be a catalyst for contemplative states of being that allow people to sense their global and local relationship to others, and to contemplate the value of trees and the rights of nature. The interactive sound was produced in Pure Data and incorporates sounds collected from nature, crowds and a repeating Prana breath to bring people back to the awareness of their own breath.

Special thanks to Twilio which makes possible the texting feature and is sponsoring the (x)trees.