Cypress Trees: A Beginning
Cypress Trees: A Beginning is the first collaboration between Anna Ridler and Caroline Sinders, using the bald cypress to think through climate change, deforestation, memory, and loss. Both artists are known for their work on the politics of datasets, and the project began as an effort to create a training set for future works of bald cypress trees - a threatened species - across the Louisiana Basin and the Gulf Coast of the United States. These trees, which can live for thousands of years, are increasingly vulnerable to rising sea levels, saltwater intrusion, dredging, and land loss. At the same time, their complex root systems and ability to grow at the water’s edge make them critical to slowing coastal erosion, which is accelerating as hurricanes intensify year on year. Within a decade, some of the trees that are included may look very different, while others may no longer exist at all. The work operates not only as a dataset, but as an archive and a form of proof of presence, especially in fragile zones where freshwater meets the Gulf of Mexico. The project also seeks to untangle the role of data itself: how it is used to map and understand loss, and how the technologies and energy systems required to produce that data sit within the broader ecology of climate change, not as neutral observers but as accelerants of the very conditions being documented. Preserved through large-scale imagery annotated with handwriting from both artists, the work holds documentation, data, and vulnerability in tension.
Process and Research
There is also something productive in the difficulty of undertaking this work with the Louisiana bald cypress. Because the species is under threat and increasingly scarce, it is conceivable that the project could document all remaining trees within a given area. This scarcity complicates the usual assumptions of scale that underpin datasets, which often privilege what is abundant, easily accessible, and straightforward to capture. In contrast, working with a limited and fragile subject foregrounds absence, constraint, and incompleteness as defining conditions. This approach opens onto a wider conversation about how datasets come into being, and how norms are established around what is worth recording. What becomes legible to machine learning systems is often what is easiest to find, measure, and reproduce, while what is rare, difficult, or vulnerable is more likely to be excluded. By focusing on a species that resists mass capture, the project challenges the assumption that larger datasets are inherently better, and instead proposes care, attention, and specificity as alternative values. In doing so, it asks how acts of documentation might shift from extraction toward responsibility, and how the limits of data can be made visible rather than smoothed over.
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Project Credits
AI is Human After All was an artist residency by Anna Ridler and Caroline Sinders with The New Real, as a part AI Lab (European ARTificial Intelligence Lab) managed by Ars Electronica. The residency was awarded in 2019, and took place during 2020 and 2021.
