Vibeke Sorensen created the Tree Dress in 2020, inspired by the indigenous people of Borneo, Indonesia, and their traditional bark cloth. The dress features digital panoramic photographs of a living tropical tree in Singapore printed on sustainable silk, enhanced with wearable technology and embedded systems. LEDs and circuits in the dress continuously display real-time measurements of O2, CO2, temperature, humidity, and light conditions of the tree. This “Internet of Living Things” (IOLT) textile allows the wearer to track and interact with the tree.
A computer system links the dress to the tree, converting gas emission data into sound (sonification) and changing colored light (visualization). This transforms scientific data into a poetic expression, enabling the wearer to symbolically “become one” with the tree. The tree’s bark is metaphorically ‘unwrapped’ and digitally embedded into the silk, ‘re-wrapped’ as a ‘second skin’ for the wearer. The work raises awareness of the tree’s condition and the deforestation of Southeast Asian rainforests.
Sorensen premiered the Tree Dress at the Beyond 3D Symposium 2020: Climate Change, ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany, via an online presentation titled Plants and the Planet on July 25, 2020. She also presented it with anthropologist Prof. J. Stephen Lansing and Nagaraju Thummanapalli at the WASET Wearable Technologies and Fashion Electronics 2020 Bali conference on October 22, 2020 (online).
The Tree Dress was featured in the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community (DAC) juried exhibition, The Earth, Our Home: Art, Technology and Critical Action, which opened on January 28, 2022. The exhibition included Sorensen’s 7.5-minute documentary, The Forest, the Punan & the Tree Dress.
From March to June 2025, the Tree Dress was installed with live sensors at Descanso Gardens in La Canada-Flintridge, California, as part of the Daphne’s Wardrobe exhibition at the Sturt Haaga Gallery.
Direct Catalogue links:
Descanso Gardens, Daphne’s Wardrobe Catalogue (see page 17):
https://www.descansogardens.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/daphneswardrobe.pdf
