Preserving Giants: How ‘Heritage Trees’ Blends Technology and Ecology

Image Credit: photo by David Weng @ 2025 ACM SIGGRAPH

In the SIGGRAPH 2025 Art Gallery, “Heritage Trees” invited visitors to slow down and look closely at living landmarks translated through computation and craft. Created by Hye Yeon Nam and Brendan Harmon, the installation combines laser scanning, volumetric modeling, 3D printing, immersive audio, and interactive environments to document ancient trees while reimagining how digital media can foster ecological awareness. In this conversation, the duo reflects on how the project grew from fieldwork to gallery exhibition, why they centered trees with layered cultural and ecological histories, and what they hope future contributors will bring to SIGGRAPH’s evolving artistic spaces.

SIGGRAPH: Tell us about “Heritage Trees” in your own words. How did the piece evolve from concept to exhibition in the SIGGRAPH 2025 Art Gallery?

Hye Yeon Nam (HN) and Brendan Hermon (BH): “Heritage Trees” is a collection of ancient trees of significant historical, cultural, and ecological importance. The work preserves digital traces of ancient trees with entangled cultural and ecological histories through laser scanning, 3D printing, immersive soundscapes, and interactive installations. By translating the trees into point-cloud data, physical artifacts, and sensory environments, the piece invites audiences to encounter them not only as natural objects, but as archives of memory, biodiversity, and place.

The project evolved through an iterative process of field documentation and studio translation. We began by identifying heritage trees and recording them through terrestrial laser scanning, capturing their presence in high-resolution point clouds. From there, we explored multiple forms of interpretation — digital simulations that emphasize scale and structure, and 3D-printed forms that re-materialize the data into tangible objects. Sound became another critical layer, allowing the work to communicate atmosphere, intimacy, and embodied attention beyond what visuals alone can convey. Through testing and refinement, these elements gradually converged into an installation that balances scientific documentation with poetic speculation.

While interacting with the installation and simulation, we hope that participants can explore interspecies connections and entanglement. Creating projects related to cohabitation with nature has helped shift our perspective to see ourselves as part of a larger network of life, rather than isolated individuals. In that sense, the project proposes an expanded direction for digital media and design, shifting the meaning-making process from individual development towards interdisciplinary, interspecies collaboration, and shared ecological responsibility.

SIGGRAPH: Why did you choose to focus “Heritage Trees” on ancient trees with historical, cultural,
and ecological significance?

HN and BH: We chose to focus “Heritage Trees” on ancient trees with historical, cultural, and ecological significance because these trees are living witnesses — exceptional not only for their longevity, but also for the layered stories they carry. Some are remarkable for their age, such as the 1,500 years old Big Cypress on Cat Island, Louisiana. Others hold cultural and historical importance, such as the 19th century Dueling Oaks in New Orleans where duelists would meet to settle scores between a pair of southern live oaks.

Beyond their symbolic value, these trees are also critical ecological archives. They serve as repositories of biodiversity and ecological memory — holding genetic histories, supporting complex habitats, and sustaining networks of life. These large, old trees are arks of biodiversity that serve as habitat for multitudes of species, vaults for vast quantities of carbon, and network armatures for fungal symbionts that shape forest health.

We were drawn to these trees because they are both extraordinary and increasingly vulnerable, yet often taken for granted in everyday life. Through “Heritage Trees”, we hope to pay more attention to their presence and meaning — to revitalize public awareness of the historical, cultural, and ecological value embedded in living landscapes that are disappearing faster than we realize.

SIGGRAPH: How do processes like laser scanning, volumetric modeling, and 3D printing contribute
to building awareness of these trees’ grandeur and ecological importance?

HN and BH: We developed 3D-printed heritage trees and digital simulations from laser-scanned point clouds. Using terrestrial laser scanning, ancient trees can be recorded in immersive detail — capturing their scale, surface texture, and complex morphology in ways that are difficult to grasp through photographs or written documentation alone. These irreplaceable specimens can be archived as point clouds, along with sound recordings, preserving not only their form but also aspects of their presence and aesthetic character.

Laser scanning and volumetric modeling allow us to translate ecological and cultural landmarks into data — revealing the trees’ grandeur while also exposing what machine vision tends to capture, simplify, or overlook. The artwork explores how computational tools see and unsee cultural landscapes, turning material traces into immaterial records, and then experiments with rematerializing those virtual artifacts through digital fabrication.

3D printing plays a crucial role in this process by bringing the data back into physical space. It transforms the point cloud from an abstract visualization into something tangible and embodied, inviting closer attention, care, and reflection. At the same time, the translation from tree to artifact using data highlights the authoritative yet imperfect nature of machine vision, prompting questions about how algorithms mediate meaning, value, and ecological significance.

SIGGRAPH: Whether you come to the Art Gallery as an established artist or someone exploring creative uses of computer graphics, what did exhibiting in the SIGGRAPH 2025 Art Gallery mean to you?

HN and BH: Exhibiting in the SIGGRAPH 2025 Art Gallery was deeply meaningful to us because SIGGRAPH is one of the rare spaces where researchers, industry professionals, artists, and students — from every career stage — come together to exchange ideas, learn from one another, and feel genuinely inspired. It’s also a unique venue where you can encounter the seemingly endless possibilities of leading technologies being applied across many disciplines and creative practices.

While Technical Papers sessions often focus on evaluating methods and validating results, the Art Gallery offers something equally essential: an experimental playground where artists can test speculative ideas and engage with values that are often critical, timely, and sometimes controversial. For me, it was a space where uncertainty is welcomed and where artistic inquiry can exist without needing to resolve into a single answer.

We wanted to share our work in that environment to explore new possibilities, challenge conventional assumptions, and invite dialogue — particularly around how humans might cohabit with nature in more thoughtful and responsible ways.

SIGGRAPH: Looking ahead to SIGGRAPH 2026, what do you hope to see explored or expanded in
the Art Gallery? What advice do you have for future contributors?

HN and BH: With a theme of “In-Betweens” in the Art Gallery at SIGGRAPH 2026, we are excited to encounter works that engage with transitional states — between identities, disciplines, materials, geographies, or moments in life — especially within our dramatically and continuously accelerating technology.

What is most compelling is how artists individually interpret and embody this theme. Each person brings a unique experience, and there is no single correct way to approach in-betweenness. The richness of the gallery comes from the coexistence of many interpretations, contradictions, and perspectives. That plurality is what makes the Art Gallery such a dynamic space.

For future contributors, our advice is simple: Don’t limit your imagination to existing technologies or familiar narratives. Let your ideas lead the technology — not the other way around. Embrace experimentation, uncertainty, and personal storytelling. Find your own story, and trust that your unique perspective is precisely what belongs in the space in between.

If you are inspired by projects like “Heritage Trees,” mark your calendar for SIGGRAPH 2026 in Los Angeles, 19–23 July, and explore programs open for submission across animation, art, research, and immersive experiences.

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