Atmospheric Forest is a large-scale VR point-cloud installation that visualises and sonifies the relations between the forest and climate. It reveals the interaction patterns between the pine-tree emissions in Pfynwald, an ancient Swiss Alpine forest, and weather conditions in this valley, affected by drought.

The trees do not only produce oxygen, but they are living bodies who breath too. I.e., they emit part of carbon dioxide, sometimes even up to 20 perc. from what they have consumed. When trees die, they release all the carbon they have collected during their lives back into the atmosphere. Atmospheric Forest explores the effects of drought on local forest ecosystems, and how such stress situations influence production of resin and volatile emissions (such as usual pine-tree scent).

uring the “Ecodata” research project (2017-2020) along with the emission data retrieved by scientists, the resin in Pfynwald forest was collected to further experiment with the “volatiles” of the forest – such as pine-tree forest smell – in order to reveal the patterns and interaction between emissions and weather. Volatile emissions from the trees are far reaching out into the atmosphere, contributing to cloud creation, influencing climate and weather conditions locally and in the region.

This research is resulting now into the data visualisation of forest emissions in VR environment, as well as hands-on experiments transforming pine-tree resin collected in Pfynwald forest into volatile substance (turpentine) and hard consistency (colophon) for creating sculptural objects.