TALKATIVE TREES

CLIENT: Personal, Academic
Louisiana State University, College of Art + Design
Senior Thesis Course

SERVICES: Information design, data visualization, publication design,
interactive media design, photography, research, exhibition design
YEAR: 2020-2022

Follow this link for the full interactive Cookie Gallery site:
https://xd.adobe.com/view/b343be31-7735-42ee-6039-08b9d51a3bca-c572/?fullscreen

OVERVIEW:
My series Talkative Trees features three components: The Cookie Gallery: Tree Rings & How We Study Them (interactive digital site), The Field Guide: Trees & How We Study Them (short book), and The Photo Guide: Trees & How We Study Them (photo book). Trees are essential to our life on this planet. We know how they provide us with the oxygen we need to live, help cool the Earth, and function as biotic-hubs. What is less known, is their incredible role as nature’s information capsules. This series explores the different types of information that we can obtain from trees and the ways in which we can do this. So, please come with me and take a journey through these talkative trees.

RECENTLY ON EXHIBIT AT WAVELAND'S GROUND ZERO HURRICANE MUSEUM.

The Exhibit

Featured at:
Waveland’s Ground Zero Hurricane Museum
Waveland, MS

Exhibit Dates:
06/2022–09/2022

EXHIBITORY

The exhibit featured 17 original framed photographs, a tree “cookie” wall, digital touchscreen activity, interactive investigate displays, an interactive “cookie” sculpture, and text-based information panels.

INTERACTIVE COOKIE SCULPTURE

This interactive sculpture uses colored strings to represent annual growth rings of a tree. Visitors to the “Talkative Trees” exhibit at Waveland’s Ground Zero Hurricane Museum were invited to participate in the development of the sculpture by providing me with their current age and place of origin. These two information points were then translated to a piece of string—the circumference representing their age and the string color (also shown as varying line-weights on the digital version) representing their place of origin. When an individual string was strung up on the correlating annual growth ring of the example cookie (a 100-year-old tree), this demonstrated (relatively) how big the visitor would be if they were a tree, at their current age. All the string that were plotted by the end of the exhibit (three-months time) can be viewed together to represent a new tree—their collective thickness equaling the new tree’s diameter.