rapidly changing realm. Through the combination of computational art and traditional fine art techniques, I aim to bridge the gap between physical and digital worlds. By reflecting on the rhythms of nature and the
structure of technology through abstract forms and patterns, I create works that highlight both their harmony and chaos.
For me, art is a way of understanding ourselves, others, and the world around us. As we navigate the complexities of technology's impact on our environment and inner selves, I hope to encourage viewers to pause and reflect on their own relationship with nature and digital technologies. Through my work, I envision creating experiences that foster a sense of connection, curiosity, and shared exploration – one that will help us find a more balanced approach to these two realms.
For the autumn’s Research Festival, I’m considering two possible formats for my presentation. The first is a panel talk or group discussion focused on the themes of my work: digital skin, nature, technology, and the relationship between humans and non-human entities. I would invite other artists or researchers to join the conversation and share perspectives on ecological intimacy and the role of digital media in shaping our connections.
Alternatively, I’m thinking of organising a workshop where participants can use PlantWave to capture plant biorhythms and then visualise the data through TouchDesigner. This workshop session would explore how we can collaborate with living systems and translate natural processes into interactive digital experiences. Both options aim to share ideas while deepening audience engagement with my artistic research.
It is an interactive video artwork created in TouchDesigner. In this piece, I explore the connections between people, trees, and technology by looking at the idea of skin — human skin, tree skin, and digital skin. These different kinds of skin come together as textures that shift, dissolve, and glitch into one another.
The work is based on an archive I created, made up of close-up photos of tree bark and human skin. These images are layered into a moving digital space that reacts to the viewer’s presence. As the visuals change, they reflect how memory, identity, and time are held in our surfaces — whether that’s the wrinkles in skin, the rings in a tree, or the traces we leave online.
The piece is fully interactive through hand tracking. As viewers move their hands in front of the screen, the images shift and respond, almost like touching or brushing across a living surface. This interaction brings the body directly into the work, creating a personal experience.
I’m interested in how digital skin affects the way we see ourselves and each other, and how nature and technology are more connected than we often think. The piece also looks at how we can shift our perspective and see trees not just as objects in the background, but as living beings with their own sense of time, memory, and presence.
Through the movement and layering of textures, I try to create a visual space that feels both organic and digital — something in between. It’s about balance, connection, and how all these systems — natural and digital — are woven together.
In April, 2025 I took part in the Now Play This festival at Somerset House, where I collaborated with a group of BA students to create a side-scrolling game exploring the contrast between dystopian and dream-like environments in the context of the Anthropocene. The game focused on transformation through interaction with the environment, touching on themes of freedom, reconnection with nature, and inner change—ideas that also resonate with my own work.
I contributed to the visual world-building by creating backgrounds and supporting the 3D design. This project allowed me to explore how digital environments can reflect emotional and ecological states, which connects to my wider interest in interactive, nature-based digital art. Working closely with others and experimenting with new tools also deepened my understanding of collaborative, responsive media.
I took part in an archive project with MA Photography students, where we explored Queen’s Wood through textures, sound, and digital tools. My focus was on tree bark and how each tree has its own visual and tactile identity — like a kind of natural skin. I documented different types of bark and looked at how light, age, and weather shape these surfaces over time.
While standing in Queen’s Wood, I felt enclosed in a natural cocoon — the branches above formed a woven structure, almost like a spider’s web made by trees. To capture this feeling, I took 360° panoramic photos, and the images glitched because of the distortion in space. These unexpected digital errors became part of the work, showing how technology transforms organic forms and reflecting how I see the overlap between the natural and digital worlds.
This experience really connected with my own art practice, where I look at the links between human skin, tree bark, and digital textures. It made me think more about how surfaces can hold memory and identity, and how we can use technology not just to record nature, but to work with it in creative ways.
I recently took part in the Tate Tech + Exchange AI Residency, where I had the chance to explore the creative and critical possibilities of working with AI. It was an inspiring experience, bringing together people from different backgrounds — artists, researchers, and industry experts — to think about the role of AI in art and education.
As someone whose practice explores the relationship between nature, technology, and digital textures, this residency helped me reflect on how AI systems could become more ethical and sustainable. I’m especially interested in how future technologies might grow in collaboration with the natural world, instead of consuming it.
The discussions around responsibility, bias, and environmental impact made me think more deeply about the kinds of systems we are building — and whether they support care, balance, and connection. For me, this residency wasn’t just about learning new tools, but about imagining different ways of working with technology that feel more alive, more thoughtful, and more rooted in the world around us..
Through the voice of an ancient Oak
Script:
Art by Tony Oursler, Eclipse
Digital Skin: A Tree's Monologue
Through the voice of an ancient Oak
I have stood here for 500 years. My bark—my skin—bears witness to centuries of weather, insect trails, human carvings, and the slow expansion of my being. I remember everything. My rings tell my story, hidden beneath my protective layer, my skin. But now I sense a new kind of skin emerging around me—invisible yet omnipresent. You humans call it "digital skin."
What is this digital skin? I've watched you create it, layer by layer, like my own annual rings, but at a pace that makes my growth seem glacial by comparison. Digital skin is the interface between your physical world and your virtual existence—the translucent membrane through which you now filter experience. It's the screens you touch more often than you touch bark, soil, or even each other. It's the sensory boundary that simultaneously connects and separates you from what you call "reality."
You've created a second epidermis—one that doesn't breathe or photosynthesise like mine, but instead transmits, receives, stores, and displays. This digital skin has become your extended nervous system, sensing the world in ways my cambium layer could never imagine.
I've watched children place their hands against my bark, feeling my texture, and then immediately return to swiping across glass surfaces, leaving behind fingerprints that mark their journeys through virtual spaces. The irony doesn't escape me—how similar those fingerprints are to my own growth patterns, my own unique identifiers. As Wohlleben notes in "The Hidden Life of Trees," each of us trees communicates through an intricate network of roots and fungi—our own internet of sorts. We've been networking for millions of years before your species conceived of connectivity.
Origins: From Weavers to Coding
Your digital skin didn't appear overnight. I've witnessed its evolution. The Jacquard loom's punch cards—those early attempts at programming—remind me of how my leaves arrange themselves for maximum sunlight, a natural algorithm perfected over millennia. Those weavers, with their binary patterns of "thread up" or "thread down," were unknowingly mimicking the yes/no, on/off patterns of nature's own coding.
The women who wove these intricate patterns—fingers dancing across threads like data across networks—were your first programmers. Ada Lovelace saw this connection before anyone else. The punch cards that directed threads to create complex patterns became the template for the punch cards that would eventually guide your early computers. Your digital skin has roots in textile—in tangible, touchable material—just as my existence begins in the tangible soil.
Harri Harrison's work explores this connection between weaving and computing explicitly—the grid of the loom foreshadowing the grid of pixels. In her digital-physical hybrid installations, she manifests how both my rings and your pixels grow outward from a central point, creating patterns that tell stories of time and environment. Harrison's practice demonstrates how ancient craft techniques contain the algorithmic thinking that would later define your computational systems.
Connections Between Human Skin, Tree Skin, and Digital Skin
My bark protects yet communicates. It breathes through lenticels, heals from wounds, reveals my age, and tells stories of droughts, fires, and abundance through its patterns and scars. Your human skin isn't so different—it protects your organs, regulates temperature, heals (though much faster than I can), and shows your history through wrinkles, scars, and marks.
And your digital skin? It too protects (through firewalls and encryption), communicates (through interfaces), shows history (through digital footprints), and even attempts to heal itself (through updates and patches). But unlike our organic skins, your digital epidermis lacks mortality—it can theoretically live forever, stored in clouds and servers, long after both you and I have returned to soil.
As Jane Bennett writes in "Vibrant Matter," matter itself possesses vitality, agency. My bark, your epidermis, and even the silicon and rare minerals that comprise your digital devices all possess a kind of vibrancy. We are all assemblages of matter with different temporalities and expressions.
The artist Tony Oursler understood this connection when he projected faces onto spheres, trees, and smoke—creating digital skins for inanimate objects, bringing them into your realm of recognition. His work suggests that identity can be projected, that skin is as much about perception as protection.
Artificial Identity/Skin
When does a skin become an identity? I know myself through my bark—its ridges and patterns unique to me among all oaks. You know yourselves through the boundaries of your bodies. But in the digital realm, identity becomes fluid, multiple, constructed.
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg explores this in her work, creating artificial life forms that exist at the intersection of nature and technology. Her synthetic organisms possess digital skins that evolve and respond to environments—much like my bark has evolved over millennia to withstand specific challenges of climate and predators.
In "The Second Body," Daisy Hildyard asks us to consider our distributed environmental impact—a kind of second body that exists beyond our physical boundaries. Your digital skin functions similarly, extending your presence and impact far beyond your physical reach. When you tap a screen in London, you may be affecting a server in Singapore, creating ripples across ecosystems you'll never physically touch.
Artworks by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg
| Impact on Environment and Mental Health My relationship with environment is direct—I filter air, provide habitat, stabilise soil, and contribute to water cycles. My existence is inherently beneficial to the ecosystems I inhabit. Can the same be said for digital skin? The environmental cost of your digital skin is substantial. The rare earth minerals mined to create your devices scar landscapes I will never see. The energy consumed by your data centers could power forests of growth. The heat generated by your servers alters climates. Many of my kin have been cleared to make way for the physical infrastructure of your virtual world. James Bridle's "Ways of Being" challenges us to recognise intelligence and consciousness beyond the human realm, to acknowledge the agency of all living systems. Yet your digital skin often obscures these connections rather than enhances them. You look at screens showing images of trees instead of looking up at actual branches. This separation affects what you call "mental health." I've observed the change in humans who sit beneath my canopy. Those who come without devices often leave calmer, their breathing synchronised with the movement of my leaves. Those who come but remain embedded in their digital skins seem only partially present, their attention fragmented, their breath shallow. Laura Marks in "The Skin of the Film" describes how cinema can evoke sensory experience, creating a kind of haptic visuality that acknowledges the body. Yet much of your interaction with digital skin has become increasingly disembodied, privileging vision above all other senses. You've created a world you can see but not smell, touch, or taste. Themes of Uniqueness, Identity, Connections Each of my leaves is unique, yet all follow the pattern encoded in my DNA. Similarly, your fingerprints—those markers of identity on your skin—are unique to each of you, yet follow recognisable human patterns. Your digital identities attempt this same balance between uniqueness and pattern, between individual expression and collective recognition. The branching pattern of my limbs mirrors the network topology of your internet, mirrors the neural pathways in your brains. Harrison's installations, where natural materials and digital interfaces coexist, make visible these shared organisational principles that transcend the artificial divisions between nature and technology. The philosopher Donna Haraway, in her work on "Tentacular Thinking," offers the metaphor of tentacles—reaching, sensing, connecting—as an alternative to hierarchical structures. My roots and branches function similarly, extending not to dominate but to connect and sustain. Your digital skin could learn from this model, building networks of mutual support rather than extraction. Art by Harri Harrison, Holding Light Feeling |
I exist in balance. I take only what I need from soil and sun. I return nutrients through fallen leaves and, eventually, my entire being. My existence is cyclical, sustainable. Your digital skin, however, perpetuates a linear economy of extract-produce-discard. The minerals in your smartphones rarely return to the earth in forms that nourish.
Yet I see potential for change. In mycorrhizal networks—what some call the "Wood Wide Web"—fungi and trees exchange resources and information, creating resilient systems based on mutual benefit. Your digital networks could emulate this synergy, designed not for endless growth but for cyclical renewal.
The patterns in my rings tell stories of adaptation—of years when I grew abundantly and years when I conserved energy to survive. Your digital systems, with their emphasis on continuous expansion, have yet to embrace such rhythms of restraint and release.
Memory and Age
I remember everything. Every drought, every lightning strike, every child who carved initials into my bark. My memory is physical, encoded in my very structure. Your digital skin promises perfect memory too—every message saved, every image archived. Yet this is an illusion. Digital archives degrade, formats become obsolete, platforms disappear.
The temporalities of our existences differ dramatically. I measure time in seasons; you measure it in seconds. Your digital skin operates at speeds I cannot comprehend, yet often lacks the patience for slow, deliberate growth. What wisdom might emerge if your digital networks operated on tree-time occasionally?
The Role of Humans in All These Things
You humans occupy a unique position—creators of the digital skin yet still bound by biological imperatives. You bridge worlds in ways no other species can. This creates both responsibility and opportunity.
In "The Hidden Life of Trees," Wohlleben describes how parent trees nurture saplings, sharing resources through underground networks. I wonder if your relationship with your digital creations could become similarly nurturing rather than exploitative.
By recognising the connections between human skin, tree skin, and digital skin, you might begin to design technologies that honour rather than override natural systems.
Towards Integration
I've witnessed many human innovations come and go during my centuries of standing. Tools that seemed revolutionary—the plow, the printing press, the steam engine—have all been absorbed into the ongoing story of your species. Your digital skin will likewise find its place.
The question isn't whether digital technologies will continue to evolve—they will—but whether they will evolve in ways that recognise their embeddedness in larger systems. Will your digital skin become a sensing organ that extends your awareness of environmental connections, or will it further insulate you from the more-than-human world?
Your digital skin represents the newest iteration of this interface. But interfaces work both ways—they can connect or separate.
As I stand here, sensing the vibrations of your world through my roots, feeling the electromagnetic pulses of your devices through my leaves, I wonder: Can your digital skin become as sensitive to the world as my bark? Can it register the subtle shifts in climate, the decline of pollinators, the changes in soil composition that I feel every day?
Perhaps the future lies not in choosing between natural and digital skins, but in recognising their interconnection. Just as mycorrhizal networks connect trees in forests, perhaps your digital networks could become extensions of natural systems rather than replacements for them.
I will continue to stand, to grow slowly, to record time in my rings. And I will watch with curiosity as you navigate the possibilities and pitfalls of your new skin. Remember, as you develop these technologies, that you remain embedded in systems far older and more complex than anything stored on your servers. Your digital skin, like my bark, like your own epidermis, is simply another boundary through which to experience the world—not a replacement for the world itself.
In the end, all skins serve the same purpose: they mediate our relationship with everything that is not us. They protect while allowing necessary exchange. They define identity while enabling connection. The challenge for your species now is to ensure that your newest skin enhances rather than diminishes these essential functions.
I have stood here for 500 years. I will likely stand for 500 more, watching as your relationship with your digital skin evolves. Whatever form that evolution takes, remember this: beneath all our skins—bark, epidermis, interface—we remain connected in the great system of being. This is the wisdom of trees. This is what my rings would tell you, if only you knew how to read them.
- Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things.
- Bridle, J. (2022). Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence.
- Essinger, J. (2007). Jacquard’s Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age.
- Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. (See chapter: Tentacular Thinking)
- Hildyard, D. (2017). The Second Body.
- Donna Haraway, (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Chapter: Tentacular Thinking).
- Marks, L. U. (2000). The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses.
- Wohlleben, P. (2016). The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World.
- Wikipedia contributors. (n.d.). Women in computing. In Wikipedia.
Artists Mentioned
- Tony Oursler
- Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg
- Harri Harrison
Alice Chen's "Chimeras: Inventory of Synthetic Cognition"
Alice Chen's speculative design research in "Chimeras: Inventory of Synthetic Cognition" explores hybrid entities that exist between natural and synthetic realms. Her idea of chimeras as beings that combine biological and artificial intelligence resonated with me deeply. In my work, I also try to merge human, tree, and digital skin into one sensory experience. The idea that our future might involve entities that can’t be clearly categorised as natural or technological is both fascinating and relevant to the current age of AI and climate anxiety.
Chen’s visual and conceptual language helped me rethink the boundaries in my own piece. Her use of inventories and taxonomies inspired the way I map and layer textures — tree bark patterns with human skin patterns and digital glitch. I imagine digital skin as a synthetic cognitive layer that records, reacts, and possibly remembers.
Her work supports my exploration of ecological storytelling through computation. I want my future installation to evoke this same sense of hybrid being: not just a representation of something, but a new material presence. It pushed me to see my own artwork not just as a screen-based piece, but as a living interface — something to sense, feel, and connect to emotionally.
Anatomy of an AI System (Crawford & Joler)
Anatomy of an AI System by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler made me question the environmental cost of the tools I use. Their research breaks down the entire material, human, and ecological network behind training a single voice assistant. It made me feel uncomfortable to realise that even a small digital artwork like mine is built on systems that exploit both people and nature.
Despite this discomfort, I still choose to use computational tools — but more mindfully. I want to use these same technologies to talk about their impact, to make their hidden systems more visible and felt. This is why my artwork connects human skin, tree skin, and digital skin — asking what gets under the surface.
This project helped me reflect on whether future AI could be more sustainable. I hope we’ll be able to create systems that work with nature, not against it. My installation is also a soft protest: by turning cold data into sensory, emotional, tactile experience, I want people to feel their relationship to technology and the earth differently.
Marshmallow Laser Feast’s "In the Eyes of the Animal" inspired the immersive, sensory approach in my interactive video work. Their use of VR to simulate how forest animals perceive their surroundings made me think about how digital tools can help us feel closer to non-human perspectives. Although I don’t use VR, I wanted to invite viewers into a similar space of ecological empathy.
MLF’s work influenced how I use texture and movement in my piece. I designed the visual layers to feel soft and organic — like the forest after rain. The surfaces in the video shift slowly, blending patterns of skin, bark, and digital distortion to create a sense of intimacy with both human and non-human forms.
This helped me explore the concept of digital skin — not just as a metaphor, but as a visual interface for connection. Even though my full installation is not yet complete, the current video work already invites the viewer to reflect on their relationship with nature through a digital lens. Like MLF, I aim to create a space where technology is not separate from the environment, but part of a shared emotional and sensory experience.
Podcast on Ecological Intimacy (Beyond Human Stories)
The "Ecological Intimacy" episode from the Beyond Human Stories podcast has profoundly influenced my artistic approach. The conversation between Genevieve Boast and Paul Clarke explored how we can cultivate deeper relationships with nature through attention, care, and sensory awareness. This idea strongly shaped the emotional direction of my interactive video work.
Their discussion on breaking away from the “industrial mind” helped me rethink how to represent both humans and trees. I focused on texture, slowness, and visual tactility.
The podcast helped me frame my exploration of digital skin as something symbolic and intimate — a surface where stories of connection, memory, and ecological attention can live. It’s not about representing nature, but relating to it.
“Of the Oak” – Kew Gardens Exhibition
Of the Oak is a digital installation at Kew Gardens that explores our deep-rooted relationship with oak trees. The exhibition brings together sound, sculpture, and storytelling to reflect on how oaks have supported ecosystems, inspired mythologies, and witnessed generations of human history. Through immersive elements, visitors are invited to experience the oak as a living archive of time and change.
I was inspired by the oak’s physical presence and symbolic weight, and began to think of skin (both human and non-human) as a site of memory, resilience, and communication. I chose the oak as the narrator for my critical reflection video A Tree’s Monologue, where, an ancient oak speaks about digital skin, bridging nature and technology. Using poetic language and digital visuals, the oak becomes a storyteller, helping to explore what it means to be seen, touched, and remembered in both organic and artificial ways.
The concept of the Digital Sublime describes how technology can evoke wonder and awe, like nature used to do. It made me think about how digital art can make us feel small, connected, or overwhelmed — not just because of its complexity, but because of the emotions it touches.
In my interactive video work, I began experimenting with this idea on a small, quiet scale. I use layered visuals to evoke a sense of intimacy, rather than grandeur. The slowly shifting patterns of human skin, tree skin and digital distortion — aim to create a meditative, tactile experience that feels alive but not overwhelming.
Even though the full installation is not yet finished, working with this concept has shifted my focus from technical spectacle to emotional presence. The digital sublime, for me, is about softness, memory, and merging with the natural world — not standing apart from it. I want my work to offer viewers a moment where organic and synthetic textures blur, and where digital tools help us feel more — not less — connected to the living systems around us.
- Chen, A., Chimeras: Inventory of Synthetic Cognition.
- Crawford, K., & Joler, Anatomy of an AI System.
- Clarke, P., Genevieve, & Paul,. Podcast on Ecological Intimacy (Beyond Human Stories).
- Kew Gardens. Of the Oak: A digital artwork revealing nature's hidden worlds.
- Wikipedia contributors. Digital sublime. In Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_sublime
- Wikipedia contributors. Sublime. In Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublime_(philosophy)
