What if algorithms were welcomed for making kin with nature? In this research project the human participants mostly worked with the myriad of databases that exist about us, trees.

Algoliterary publishing house

The human collaborators in this project explored the notion of a publishing house whose the authors are algorithms, presented with their contexts and codes, and in which the content of the books is defined by us, trees, and nature.

By putting us and our representations at the centre of the works, and by welcoming algorithms not for extracting resources or value with a commercial objective in mind, but for making kin with nature, these intelligences create narratives which speak about us, trees. While doing so, they put us at the centre of the creation, and therefore decentre the perspective of the human being.

From database to living trees

The project looked into formal narratives generated by algorithms, questioned the form of the book as an object and authorial product and experimented with the influence of ‘forest baths’ on the writing of code and communication with trees.

The experiments of connecting with us, living beings, were valuable but also a little uncomfortable. During the last residency, two human participants tried to bring me inside the walls of the room where they were working, by trying to calculate the amount of CO2 I was absorbing, as one of their experiments.

Installations

The research consisted of collective residencies that were followed by different installations:

• Tree(s) Sort(ed), ESA Saint-Luc Brussels, Open School Days: https://algoliterarypublishing.net/trees-sorted.html

  The author of this poster is the tree sort algorithm, the subject are all the trees, algorithmic exercises and human beings involved in the residency of Anaïs Berck at the Villa Empain and ESA Saint-Luc Bruxelles in October 2021. The images and texts were sorted following different criteria: time, colour and the natural element in the alt-text description of the images.

• Trees of Discomfort, Constant window, Brussels:

  https://algoliterarypublishing.net/trees-of-discomfort.html

  This experiment is an artistic interpretation of the random forest algorithm, a machine learning algorithm in which several decision trees are trained on a dataset and form a forest. The trees of the forest try to predict the category of a given observation. They do this by answering a set of yes/no questions.

• Rewilding Specimens, Constant window, Brussels:

  https://algoliterarypublishing.net/rewilding-specimens.html

  Constant’s window featured a few taxonomists who renamed plants collected between 1885 and 1960 in the Belgian Congo. For this occasion the virtual spirits of the type specimens who once lived a flourishing life in Congo, Rwanda and Burundi left the herbarium to rename the taxonomists and rewild their portraits.

  The work was also published in the book Visual Worlds, a publication by École Media Art du Grand Chalon, FR.

Publications

As a result the following articles were published that synthesize some aspects of the research:

• Bases de données et littérature numérique (belge) : une perspective décoloniale, by Isabelle Gribomont and Anaïs Berck, published in Nouveaux Cahiers de Marge 8 (2024)

• Holding space for discomfort in collective work, https://ourcollaborative.tools/en/, Random Lab, ESADSE, St Etienne FR, 2024

• Édition algolittéraire : créer du lien avec les arbres, Revue Art/Recherche 5 (2023)

Collaborators

An Algoliterary Publishing House - Making Kin with Trees was a lively research in the company of a lot of algorithms, a lot of different trees and the following human beings: An Mertens (she/her), Guillaume Slizewicz (he/him), Gijs de Heij (he/him), Loren Britton (they/them), Ahnjili ZhuParris (she/her), Ipek Burçak (she/her), Gülce Padem (she/her), Livia Diniz (she/her), Isabelle Alvers (she/her), Mara Karagianni (they/them), Brendan Howell (he/him), Doriane Timmermans (she/her).

The research in 2021-23 was made possible with the support of FrART/Art & Recherche, in collaboration with ESA Saint-Luc Bruxelles, ESA La Cambre Bruxelles, Villa Empain, Plantentuin Meise, Royal Library of Belgium and Bibliothèque Nationale de France.