Protected Trees

This ongoing research-led digital art project explores Protected Trees in metropolitan cities through interactive installations and sculpture. It reveals how trees survive within networks of urban planning and artefacts, questioning subject–object divide and more-than-human world.

This research-led digital art project suggests a set of interactive installation and sculptural work that explores the presence and agency of Protected Trees within metropolitan environments. The project invites audiences to uncover how these trees persist, adapt, and operate within complex networks shaped by urban planning, legal frameworks, technological systems, and everyday artefacts.

By foregrounding trees that are formally designated for protection, the work examines how non-human entities are regulated, preserved, and instrumentalised within human-centred urban infrastructures. The installations function as sites of encounter, where digital interfaces, sensors, and sculptural forms mediate relationships between human participants and arboreal life, making visible the often-overlooked negotiations between ecological systems and constructed environments.

Central to the project is a critical interrogation of the subject–object dichotomy through which humans have historically understood and interacted with non-human beings. Rather than positioning trees as passive objects of conservation or aesthetic appreciation, the work frames them as active agents that shape and are shaped by urban processes. In doing so, it draws attention to forms of non-human labour, endurance, and resistance embedded within the city.

Through research-driven methodologies and speculative digital practices, the project proposes alternative ways of sensing, understanding, and coexisting with non-human actors. It encourages viewers to reconsider dominant anthropocentric perspectives and to reflect on how networks of governance, technology, and ecology intersect in everyday urban life.