In 2020, inspired the indigenous people of Borneo, Indonesia and their traditional bark cloth, Vibeke Sorensen created the Tree Dress that consists of digital panoramic photographs of a living tropical tree in Singapore printed onto sustainable silk, with wearable technology and embedded systems. LEDs and circuits inserted into the dress display the continuous measurement of the O2 / CO2, temperature, humidity, and light conditions of the tree in real-time. It is an “Internet of Living Things” (IOLT) textile that can be worn to track and interact with it. The computer system connecting the dress and the tree converts the gas emission data into sound and music (sonification) and changing coloured light (visualization). The work thus communicates not only the real-time scientific data but translates it into a fluid poetic representation. The wearer of the garment can thereby symbolically identify with the tree, or “become one” with it. The tree’s enveloping bark is metaphorically ‘unwrapped’ and through digital media embedded into the sustainable silk, ‘re-wrapped’ as a ‘second skin’ for the person wearing the dress. The data and the dress provide an alternative way to expand our awareness of the condition of the tree and bring attention to deforestation of the rainforests of Southeast Asia.
Vibeke Sorensen premiered the Tree Dress at the Beyond 3D Symposium 2020: Climate Change, ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany, (online) in her presentation entitled Plants and the Planet, on July 25, 2020. She also made an oral presentation together with anthropologist Prof J. Stephen Lansing and Nagaraju Thummanapalli, entitled Tree Dress and the Internet of Living Things, at the WASET Wearable Technologies and Fashion Electronics 2020 Bali conference, on 22 October 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 28 January 2022. The exhibition included Sorensen’s 7.5 minute documentary video, The Forest, the Punan & the Tree Dress (2022, 7 min 30 sec).
