Market Review: The Breathing of Trees

On Saturday 5 August at 12:30, a large-scale VR point cloud installation titled “Atmospheric Forest” can be seen at Künstlerhaus otte1, which visualises the relation between trees and their environment. It shows the effects of emissions from pine trees in an old alpine forest.

The trees not only produce oxygen, but they are also living bodies that breathe. This means they emit some carbon dioxide, sometimes as much as 20 per cent of what they have consumed. When trees die, they release all the carbon they have collected during their life back into the atmosphere.

As part of the Ecodata research project (2017-2020), scientists have been collecting emissions data to further explore forest “fugitives” – such as the smell of the pine forest – to uncover patterns and interactions between emissions and weather. The trees’ fugitive emissions reach far into the atmosphere, contributing to cloud formation and influencing the climate.

Artist couple Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits from Riga have translated the research into data visualisation in a VR environment. The result is a video in an endless loop in which the breathing of the trees becomes visible, as it were.