Thijs Biersteker’s work hinges on collaborations with scientists in order to transform facts into emotions, while avoiding provocation or fear, in order to ensure the audience finds an emotional connection with the issues, to make the situation personal, and to encourage us to act. To do so, he resorts to technology, in particular AI, not for its own sake, but as a medium offering an experiential dimension. By using the same sensors and tools as researchers, his immersive installations highlight such things as intelligence, communication systems, and the systemic inclusion of plants, which act as a metaphor of our relationship with the world.
You describe yourself as an environmental artist. Does that mean that you think that the environmental crisis has changed the role of artists?
Art has historically leant itself to reflecting what’s happening in society—in the words of Nina Simone, “An artist’s duty is to reflect the times”—so I am always surprised to see that climate change, environmental issues, and the ecological collapse—the major challenges of our time—are not the subject of more artistic work. That is true not only of fine art, but also of literature and filmmaking. Too little is done for a subject this important. I don’t understand why it doesn’t get integrated more often. If the function of art is to reflect society, we’re doing a terrible job. This is what drove me as an artist to try to find my voice within these important issues, as, most of the time, like everybody else, when I read about them, I get frustrated. I think it’s my duty as an artist to make these complicated issues simple and accessible through my practice.
I choose the most difficult subjects— the mundane ones that look boring, or those that people think they have heard everything about—and I start to work with scientists in order to see if I can find an interesting angle, or something that I’ve never heard before and that I think people should know about. In a way, it’s almost a mix of art, communications, and activism. What we as artists can do is to provide a new perspective, clarify, or put a futuristic angle on the important issues of our time. We should all take more responsibility in taking on the subject, but also in how we make our work. We should consider its environmental impact while engaging more with environmental issues.
To raise awareness on these environmental issues you use a lot of technology, from AI to VR, which doesn’t sound like an obvious choice at first glance. Why did you choose these as your mediums?
For me, technology is just like paint. I truly believe that if any painter or artist from previous centuries had the tools that we have today, they would have used them in the same way. I don’t see them as technology, but rather as a type of paint to express my ideas. I also believe there is a clear distinction between artists that use technology to show technology and artists that use technology as their medium. What I like about technology is that it fits this time and culture better than a canvas on a blank wall. That is asking a lot of the audience, to stand in front of a painting for hours to become fully immersed in it. We live in a society where our attention span is shorter. Technology has the unique ability to immediately immerse a viewer, while also getting them more involved in an issue. As an environmental artist, the ecological issues I want to address always seem pretty distant— like deforestation in the Amazon. Technology can enable us to make a human connection with the viewer and help in communicating the issue and making it personal instead of something distant and abstract. This is why I choose technology to create immersive installations.
An interesting aspect of these immersive installations is that they create a sense of wonder. Do they offer a way of having an impact on people’s behavior in a personal and sensitive manner that may be more effective than scaring them with facts?
I try to avoid being provocative or shocking people as newspapers already do that. Most of the facts coming out are pretty scary and very often when you learn about them you feel overwhelmed. It paralyzes you. You don’t know what to do or how to react. What I try to do in my work is to allow people to understand and emotionally connect to the issue in a way that is not shocking in the beginning, but that will linger. A good example of that is Plastic Reflectic, my work about plastic pollution in the oceans. When you approach the piece, you can play with it, and people think it’s funny at first. Then they start to realize the message and, as it slowly sinks in, they start to feel the issue. It’s the same with Voice of Nature: when people approach it, they feel meditative due to the fact that it’s beautiful. It’s only after letting it sit with them for a while that they start understanding the work and the issue behind it. These feelings are basically a pathway to reflecting on the bigger environmental issue.
The question for me is then how do you turn scientific facts into feelings? The moment you start speaking to scientists, they tell you way more interesting things than they put into their papers, as they have to explain what they actually mean in a way that a layperson can understand. They skip the scientific language and try to find emotional triggers. When I have that moment, when an unknown fact resonates with my feelings, I know that I have something that I can work with. Most of these ideas come naturally from my reaction to what they explain to me, and then I imagine an artwork rooted in their scientific research. It’s not pseudoscience, which is always problematic. I really enjoy that moment when we settle on that one surprising fact that is obscure but should be universally recognized.
Do you feel that you have a duty as an artist to work on communicating scientific facts in the face of the rise of fake news?
We live in an era where we all see that facts and scientists do not get the respect they deserve. If someone seriously studies a subject for twenty years, they know better. It really is that simple. For example, climate change has been known for forty or fifty years now, and we’re still largely in this stage of denial, of still questioning if it’s real. Part of public opinion still seems hesitant to act.
I blame scientists for that in part, and I blame the rest on those in cultural fields for not adequately addressing it. If the research does not reach us, then how can the research teach us? Way too often, the scientific world is focused on publishing papers to build their career credentials and then just publishing more papers instead of trying to build a conversation with the general public in order to discuss their findings. Hundreds of years ago, every discovery echoed through society in a vibrant, powerful way.
When it did, we all progressed and used it to move forward as a society. Too often scientific research is just published in exclusive scientific publications and hidden behind paywalls. The general public doesn’t know about it because they cannot access that knowledge. While science has done a bad job of communicating findings in a public way, culture has done a bad job in making those discoveries interesting.
I try to bring a new and more universal language to scientists. Voice of Nature is a good example of that. We used an algorithm and code to create an artwork to build a language that people can understand. They feel connected to these environmental issues through the creation of this language that they can interact with and reflect on. When we built the installation in Chengdu, someone there was really into trees and said that the one we were going to use wasn’t healthy enough, that it needed more water. Everybody else objected, at first. However, we put all our sensors in the ground and the data clearly showed that the tree did in fact need watering. Within 15 minutes there was somebody with a giant water truck watering the tree. To me, that illustrates our need for a shared language between nature and humanity, but also between scientists and the rest of us. We need to bridge the communication gap.
How did you get interested in the field of plant intelligence?
It started off with Voice of Nature, where I just wanted to see if I could get data out of nature that explains climate change without the interference of a scientist. Can we just hook a tree up to sensors and have the tree effectively talk? When I started to dig deeper, I started to read pieces about indigenous people talking to plants, and, just through observation, have a better relationship with them. I dove into this idea of how nature is connected, not only as one entity following Lovelock’s Gaia principle, but also in communication from tree to tree. A lot of research has been done on the topic of tree-to-tree communication since the 1980s but it is only becoming more popular now. I feel it shows nature’s unique capabilities while also teaching us meaningful lessons. When trees talk to each other, they keep each other in balance and warn each other, all the while still competing for light. Just like us, they’re battling each other socially yet, under the ground, they feed each other and keep each other healthy because they know if one tree falls, the rest won’t be able to withstand storms.
I explored that form of communication with Symbiosa. There’s an interesting lesson in plant communication and plant intelligence that we can apply to our society, which is a bit broken now. When you explore the scientific angle of why trees communicate, you realize that’s something we need in society right now. Like the trees, we need to keep each other healthy and have solid relationships. If you have that, you can expand and compete. Every time I dive into their collective intelligence, I learn from their simplicity and their efficiency. The moment you realize how good plants are at talking to each other you get a bit jealous at how democratic and fair it is.
Symbiosa is a really nice word as it showcases their ability to communicate and protect and how those aspects influence their growth and general reactions to their environment. It allows visitors to understand the unique capability of trees. That’s the scientific “wow” factor. However, beyond that, it provides a pathway for us to question ourselves, as a metaphor, because if nature all around us is working in this healthy way, why are we not doing that as carbon-based beings?
Symbiosa is a good example of the way you can collaborate with scientists as an artist. Could you elaborate on how you worked with Stefano Mancuso on this installation?
I met Mancuso through the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. They were interested in Voice of Nature and wanted me to work with Stefano as he is one of the most remarkable individuals in the field of plant intelligence. I went to his International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology in Florence. My first impression was that he thought that I was just another artist that was just doing art and he started to explain everything on a very basic level. Then I showed him Voice of Nature and he was very surprised to see that we were using the exact same sensors. We quickly started building on our collective insights and built a new piece. It was a really smooth collaboration as we spoke the same language and understood the same technologies. I called him a few months later for Econtinuum, my new work mimicking tree roots, as we had been talking about how trees are able to talk to each other through underground channels. I wanted to build a work that shows how perfectly balanced this communication was. Here again, we were on the same page, between what he was doing in his lab and what I was doing in my studio—mostly because we share tools, as an artist and scientist. It was a good relationship built around “boys and their toys.”
Econtinuum intermingles plant and artificial intelligence. Are we currently able to reach a level of natural complexity with artificial intelligence?
Artificial intelligence is still an emerging field. We’re at that moment where it’s more artificial than intelligence, as it is not that intelligent yet. I don’t present Symbiosa as a work on artificial intelligence, for example. We just use AI tools to program how trees talk to each other. We use the knowledge and the data sets that we have, then we program how they would react to each other and let it play out, which I really like. For me, as an artist, it’s interesting to come back to your work after a month and find that it has become somewhat or completely different from what you envisioned it would be. As a result, it stays interesting for me as well.
We run AI-driven computer simulations of how trees react to each other, which is one of the best tools that we have at the moment. We use it for audio as well. Trees are basically given their own soundscape. They react to each other based on linguistics, using structures in sentence forms. The simulated trees started talking to each other, forming their own language and, after a while, we came back and found that the AI had completely done its own thing. Of course, then we have to scale them back, to make it esthetically beautiful. But AI is just a tool that happens to be the best way of simulating plant intelligence currently.
Beside your artistic practice, you also teach. Is it a way to advocate for this relationship between art and science?
I think it’s an obligation to start teaching to a new generation when you reach a certain level. You can then share certain things in order to avoid becoming an island. My work is about connecting people to scientific facts that really matter, which is why I started to teach at Delft University of Technology and at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. I engage with the science and art-science students there and try to convey what I try to bring to my artwork, namely how to communicate these complex issues in an approachable and accessible, rather than in a traditionally rigid way. One of these students could very well discover a new way of eliminating a disease or a virus. Now imagine if they are unable to translate their groundbreaking scientific research into something that could reach the general public. Chances are that all this work would then have been for nothing, and simply end up in a scientific journal without achieving wide dissemination. Teaching students to communicate scientific ideas to the layperson is really important for me as I am very much in love with scientific knowledge, while also being afraid that this knowledge is being left unused.
The process is that we make artworks together: they take their favorite research and then start doing a deep dive into the ethics of it, exploring their point of view, who they are, and why this research resonates with them. From their own scientific research, they start to make photographs, movies, or sculptures. They learn how to express themselves a little bit better. Ultimately, we want to find the human behind the scientist as well.
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