keen

A virtual silver birch grows in real time, at the true pace of a tree, its form shaped day after day by the weather and air quality recorded wherever the artist goes: his movements through the world become the very climate in which the virtual tree lives. It is less the portrait of a place than of a relationship in motion. The birch stands in a virtual landscape yet is carried along, a travelling companion whose seasons are assembled from the cities and countries the artist passes through, its rhythm and health bound to a human life and the directions it takes.

Its growing environment becomes a metaphorical visualisation of something real: the dense web of bonds that ties human life to the natural world, to the air, the weather and the quality of a shared biosphere. An interdependence that usually stays invisible is made perceptible through the technological medium and the data that drive it.

Planted on 1 May 2026 and conceived to grow for up to a hundred years, the tree accumulates its environment as form: each season of light, temperature and pollution is inscribed in the geometry of trunk, branches and canopy, until the work becomes the record of a shared life, of where it has travelled and the air it has breathed.

Built in the browser and fed by a continuous stream of environmental data, keen treats the artwork not as an object but as a living companion, entangled with a person and the climate they move through: a slow archive that returns the viewer to non-human time and to the incremental scale at which an ecology writes itself.