Cypress Trees: Fragmentation

Cypress Trees: Fragmentation is a moving-image installation that translates the bald cypress dataset created by Anna Ridler and Caroline Sinders into a generative video work in which white, tree-like forms emerge and dissolve against a black field. Generated through a GAN trained on the collected imagery, the trees appear as partial, unstable figures. The work presents nature as something mediated through technological systems, where representation is an act of translation rather than preservation. These spectral trees function as ghosts of a potential speculative future landscape. By foregrounding breakdown and instability rather than realism, the installation exposes both the limits of machine vision and the fragility of the environments it seeks to model, allowing the generative process itself to become a metaphor for ecological uncertainty and erasure.