An unassuming cacao tree in Indonesia has made a unique connection to a high-tech artwork in China. Thanks to ecological data artist Thijs Biersteker, “ORIGIN” is a sculpture — a “digital twin” — that reflects the sensors monitoring the growth and elemental experiences of the tropical tree through pulses of light.
“When it rains in Indonesia, you see the sap flow through the sculpture in real time,” the artist says. “When the air quality shifts, the flows respond. During a heatwave, the tree visibly struggles. This real-time installation reveals just how fragile the cacao supply chain has become.”
A majority of cacao, the primary ingredient in chocolate, is cultivated in places that are also the most vulnerable to the effects of the climate crisis. Extreme weather, habitat destruction, and other issues also mean that global food resiliency is increasingly threatened.
For Biersteker, data provides unique insights into changes on the ground, and through a recent collaboration with the Indonesian Coffee and Cocoa Research Institute (ICCRI), he devised a way to literally illuminate environmental impacts.
The artist collaborates with environmental scientists to explore the relationship between data and nature, harnessing science for communication and to show how every change affects biodiversity, food, and habitats. Hooking up sensors to a specimen at ICCRI’s research site in Java, Bierksteker created a translucent, sculptural mirror of the tree, which is currently installed at Zaishui Art Museum in the city of Rizhao, Shandong Province.
Another work, “WITHER,” in collaboration with UNICEF, comprises a tropical installation with flickering leaves representing rainforest loss. Each disappearing leaf symbolizes 128 square meters of deforestation, based on data from Amazon rainforest watch groups. And “ECONTINUUM,” a collaboration with Stefano Mancuso, invites us into a kind of “conversation” occurring between tree roots in a twinkling digital composition. The work nods to recent scientific discoveries that show how trees communicate with one another via their intricate subterranean systems to provide or request nutrients or warn others of dangers like disease or infestations.
For “ORIGIN,” the live cacao tree in Java transmits information, its digital copy animating with fluctuating light. “This mirrors the role of the institutions behind it: making the invisible visible and reconnecting people with the systems that feed them,” Biersteker says in a statement. “It is where data begins to speak to the imagination and where data-driven art becomes a new language for change.”
Explore more on Bierksteker’s website and Instagram. If you enjoy pieces that explore the intersection of data and nature, you’ll also like Marshmallow Laser Feast’s “Of the Oak” installation at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
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