T(h)ree Gives Voice to a 200-Year-Old London Plane Tree
If trees could talk, what stories would they tell?
The talking tree is a common motif in folklore, mythology, and fantasy books. The Yoruba people tell of Iroko Oluwere, a benevolent spirit living inside a tree, and the tree-like Ents in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings protected the forests of Middle Earth.
These stories were told to relay reverence for the natural world and suggest that all life has a voice if we listen closely enough.
While trees do not have a “language” in human terms, scientists have discovered that they communicate and share resources via a fungal network around their roots, nicknamed the “wood wide web.”
T(h)ree is an interactive architecture project that gives voice to a 200-year-old London Plane tree in Clarence Gardens, Regent’s Park Estate, Central London. T(h)ree uses an open source large language model to answer questions from visitors to the park.
The Story Tree, as it is called, uses voice recordings contributed by the residents of Regent’s Park Estate, and “speaks” with an eerie, synthesized amalgamation of the voice captures. Once in a while, it hums the melody to ‘Daisy Bell,’ an homage to the first computer speech synthesis program.
The project is powered by a Mac Mini server and uses OpenAI Whisper for speech recognition. All the hardware and software components are described on the tree’s root mounds. It is built on a self-contained, local stack with Mistral OpenOrca running on the Ollama platform.
T(h)ree showcases the potential of large language models (LLMs) for capturing and preserving language, culture, and knowledge. The open source LLM, Mistral OpenOrca, is fine-tuned with stories and memories from the community combined with species and ecological information provided by a local arborist, Liam McGough.
Liam says the Story Tree “blends seamlessly with its surroundings” and “the pathways that lead to it remind people of the connection it has to the surrounding trees.” She says participating allowed her to share her knowledge of arboriculture and offer it to the zeitgeist. She imagines a future where a lady can talk with the tree about her passed husband, and inquisitive children can ask questions that adults don’t have the patience for.
The system diagram in the tree’s root mounds outlines the project’s “complex ecological, technological, and social interdependencies.” It describes the work and investment that goes into LLMs, as well as other biological and social relationships that affect the Story Tree.
Haque Tan is the design studio responsible for the project and is led by Ling Tan and Usman Haque, trained architects and award-winning designers. T(h)ree is part of their More-than-Human Assembly, a collection of global installations that create an “immersive environment for cross-species discussion, deliberation & decision-making.”
Haque says they decided to give the tree a voice that reflected the perception of the people who knew it best. To him, the technical implementation is not as interesting as the social-political questions it raises about how technology mediates our interactions with the environment. He says T(h)ree offers a way to rehearse interactions with non-humans even as inter-species communication improves.
You can find more information on the T(h)ree project page.