Using scientific facts as artistic material, Dutch artist Thijs Biersterker seeks to emotionally connect the public to global questions, to inspire a desire to take action. He uses technology, in particular AI, as a medium. His immersive installations highlight the intelligence and communication systems of plants: thus creating a bridge between living beings.
You describe yourself as an environmental artist. Does that mean that you think that the ecological crisis has changed the role of artists?
Art has historically leant itself to reflecting what’s happening in society—in Nina Simone words, “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 big challenges of our time—are not the subject of more artistic work. That is true not only of plastic 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 woven into 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 it, 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 hardcore 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 today. We all should take more responsibility in taking on the subject, but also in how we make our work. We should consider the environmental impact of our work, while at the same time, engaging more with environmental issues.
To raise awareness on these environmental issues you are using a lot of technology, from AI to VR, which doesn’t sound like an obvious choice at first glance. Why did you choose those as your medium?
For me, technology is just 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 canvas on a blank wall. That asks a lot of the audience—to stand in front of a painting for hours to fully immerse 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 far away, that feel distant—like deforestation in the Amazon. Technology can enable us to make a human connection with the viewer and helps a lot 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 generate a sense of wonder. Do they offer a way to have an impact on people’s behaviour in a personal and sensitive manner that may be more effective than frightening them with facts?
I try to avoid being provocative or shocking people as newspapers are already doing that. Most of these 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 and you don’t know how to react. What I try to do in my work is to make it so people 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 at first people think it’s funny. 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 towards 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 or anything in that sense, which is tricky. I really enjoy that moment when we settle on that one surprising fact that is at the same time obscure but should be universally recognized.
Cela a débuté avec Voice of Nature. L’idée de départ était de chercher des façons de mettre en scène des données directement issues de la nature pour illustrer le changement climatique sans avoir besoin de scientifiques comme intermédiaires. Pouvait-on simplement brancher des capteurs sur un arbre et faire en sorte qu’il « parle » pour de vrai ?
Quand j’ai commencé à creuser la question, j’ai découvert que certains peuples autochtones échangeaient avec les plantes et, par simple observation, tissaient de meilleures relations avec elles. J’ai alors plongé dans cette idée d’une nature connectée, non pas seulement comme une entité unique, suivant l’hypothèse Gaïa formulée par Lovelock, mais pouvant également communiquer d’arbre en arbre. Il y a eu beaucoup de recherches sur ce sujet de la communication entre arbres depuis les années 1980, mais le sujet n’a gagné en popularité que tout récemment. Il me semble que la notion d’intelligence végétale démontre les capacités uniques de la nature et nous offre des enseignements utiles. Quand les arbres se parlent, ils s’équilibrent et se préviennent les uns les autres, alors qu’ils sont par ailleurs en concurrence pour la lumière. Tout comme nous, ils s’affrontent socialement, mais sous terre ils se nourrissent et se maintiennent mutuellement en bonne santé, car ils savent très bien que si un arbre tombe, tous les autres auront des difficultés à surmonter les tempêtes à venir.
J’ai notamment exploré cette forme de communication dans Symbiosa. J’ai le sentiment qu’il y a une leçon fondamentale à tirer de l’intelligence végétale et de la communication entre les plantes, que nous devrions appliquer à l’ensemble de notre société, actuellement quelque peu brisée. En explorant scientifiquement les raisons qui poussent les arbres à communiquer, force est de constater que c’est quelque chose dont nous aurions besoin dans nos sociétés humaines. Comme les arbres, nous devons nous maintenir mutuellement en bonne santé et entretenir des relations solides. Ce n’est qu’à partir du moment où ces relations sont bien établies que nous pouvons nous développer individuellement et entrer en compétition. Chaque fois que je suis amené à m’intéresser à l’intelligence collective des plantes, j’apprends de leur simplicité et de leur efficacité. Voir à quel point les plantes sont douées pour communiquer entre elles rend vraiment jaloux du caractère démocratique et juste de ces échanges.
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 by observing, having 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 communicating from tree to tree. A lot of research has been done on the topic of tree-to-tree communication since the 1980s but only now is it becoming more popular. 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 they 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 another and keep each other healthy because they know if one tree falls the rest won’t be able to withstand storms.
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