Vibeke Sorensen: Tree Dress

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ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community Exhibition – The Earth, Our Home: Art, Technology and Critical Action

Tree Dress connects us to the Cave Punan, the last known mobile hunter-gatherers in Borneo, and probably all of Asia, whose ancestors have lived as forest stewards for thousands of years. Their way of life and the forests they depend on, are being threatened by logging and the expansion of palm oil plantations. Vibeke Sorensen is working with anthropologist J. Stephen Lansing and the Nature Conservancy to support their claim to their ancestral forests.

Tree Dress brings the agency of the digital arts and technology field to efforts to save their way of life and the ecosystem that sustains them, and by extension our collective humanity and natural environment. The Cave Punan clothe themselves in the bark of forest trees. Inspired by their example, the “Tree Dress” is an Internet of Living Things (IOLT) work that employs panoramic digital photography to digitally unwrap the bark of a living Southeast Asian rainforest tree, as a poetic way to become one with it while also bringing attention to the Punan people and the fragile natural environment they depend upon. The panoramic images are digitally printed in high resolution onto sustainable silk which is then made into a dress with soft circuits and embedded systems so as to track, visualize and sonify the environmental conditions and CO2/O2 emission of the physical tree in real-time. Sensors are placed at the actual living tree in order to monitor it, and the data is sent wirelessly to a receiver and displayed on the soft circuits in the dress. Both the tree and the dress can be monitored on a web app in real-time.

This project is a reversal of the dematerialization of data, instead re-materializing it. More sensors are worn by the Cave Punan themselves. Belts with GPS trackers, as unobtrusive wearable technologies, are worn by the Cave Punan as they travel between caves, rock shelters and forest camps. They are surrounded on three sides by logging and oil palm plantations. Visualization of the tracks from the sensors enable them to map their relationship to their ancestral forests. The Nature Conservancy is using these visualizations to support the efforts of the Cave Punan to preserve their homeland. The forests of Borneo contain the greatest terrestrial biodiversity on our planet.