Talking Trees

What if trees could speak - and what if we did not like what they had to say?

In a clearing in Søndermarken’s thicket, a tangle of wires, sensors, lights, and speculative biotech devices winds its way around the trees: an advanced translation machine designed to make communication between humans and non-human intelligence possible. Visitors are invited into conversations with the trees, asking questions and listening as the forest responds.

But if we could speak with the trees, what would they tell us? Do they see us as friends, or do they carry an ancient, silent anger that we have tamed and cultivated them to the point where wild nature has almost disappeared? And is it really nature’s voice we are hearing - or an echo of ourselves and our technologies?

Talking Trees explores the tensions between nature, technology, and projection. The installation stages an encounter in which artificial intelligence becomes a speculative medium: not to reproduce scientific truth, but to imagine what a more-than-human dialogue might feel like. In doing so, it asks whether we are truly listening to the forest, or merely confronting our own hopes, fears, and fantasies reflected back to us through the machine.

The installation is built with Touchdesigner as the main controller for managing the states of the agents and sending api calls in and out to different locally hosted services. Speech-to-Text model for transcribing what the audience says, LLM inference engine for generating answers and Text-to-Speech model for audio synthesis. All of this made possible using bespoke python extensions for TouchDesigner, to extend the programs functionality.

To give the trees the agency and soul that they were warranted, we needed to give them a presence both in the material and the immaterial sense. For the material part of it we partnered up with 10-TONS who made the physical sculptures - a future biotech amplification device.

For the immaterial part we implemented a Text-to-Speech model with voice cloning and sourced local voice talents to give their take on a talking tree. The result was a way more lively and authentic voice for the agents, that had both variation and breath.

When there is no interaction from the audience an 6-channel audio track have the trees in dialog amongst themself, talking about the ethics and their feelings about their current situation. This is on top of a soundscape that samples nature sounds of the forest blended with synthesizer and sounds of the tech world.

We also had DMX controlled lights installed around the inning and had the TouchDesigner patch setup to control the light intensity based on which agent was talking. Making the forrest breath light with the voices of the trees.

Talking Trees is supported by the Ny Carlsberg Foundation, the Obel Family Foundation, and the Danish Arts Foundation.