Thijs Biersteker’s digital sculpture transforms climate data into urgent call for action – Huge
Indonesia’s modest cocoa trees have made unique connections with Chinese high-tech artworks. Thanks to Multimedia digital artist Thijs Biersteker, “Origin” is a sculpture – “Digital Twins”, which reflects the basic experience of tropical trees through pulses of light.
“When it rains in Indonesia, you see SAP pass through the sculpture in real time,” the artist said. “When air quality changes, the flow responds. During the heat wave, the trees obviously struggle. This real-time installation reveals how fragile the cocoa supply chain has become.”
Most cacao is a major ingredient in chocolate and is grown in places that are most vulnerable to climate crisis. Extreme weather, habitat destruction and other issues also mean that global food resilience is increasingly threatened.
For Biersteker, the data provides unique insights into change on the ground and through a recent collaboration with the Indonesian Coffee and Cocoa Institute (ICCRI), a method to literally shed light on environmental impacts.
Artists are particularly interested in the relationship between data and nature, especially our scientific understanding of climate change and how it affects biodiversity, food and habitat. Bierksteker connected the sensor to the specimen at the ICCRI research site and created a translucent sculptural mirror that is currently installed at the Zaishui Art Museum in Rizhao City, Shandong Province.
Another work in collaboration with UNICEF, “Wild” is a tropical installation with twinkling leaves representing rainforest losses. According to the Amazon Rainforest Watch Group, each flash symbolizes deforestation of 128 square meters. The collaboration with Stefano Mancuso, “Econtinuum” and “Econtinuum” invite us to participate in a kind of “dialogue” that takes place between the roots in the flashing digital work. This work pays homage to recent scientific discoveries that suggest trees communicate with each other through complex underground systems to provide or demand nutrition or warn of other dangers, such as disease or intrusion.
For “original”, the real-time cocoa tree in Java transmits information, and its digital copy is animated with fluctuating light. “This reflects the role of the institution behind it: making invisible visible and reconnecting people with the systems that feed them,” Biersteker said in a statement. “This is where data starts to talk about imagination, and data-driven art becomes a new language of change.”
Explore more on Bierksteker’s website and Instagram. If you like to explore the fragments of data intersection with nature, you will also like the “oak” installation from Kew Royal Botanic Gardens at Marshmallow Laser Feast.
