KEEN
2026 - ongoing
web installation
generative code, real-time environmental data
Keen is a long-term generative work conceived as a companionship between the human and the other-than-human. 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. The artist's movements through the world become the very climate in which the tree lives. It is less the portrait of a place than of a relationship in motion: the birch stands in a virtual landscape but is somehow 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 thus 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 atmosphere. An interdependence that usually stays invisible, here 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 alongside the artist.
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.