As the Leaves Settle

This project examines tree data of the Tilia genus of trees from my hometown. My examination of this data served as some preliminary exploration into this genus of tree, a centerpiece of my upcoming thesis research. As a broad overview, I am interested in my relationship with the American Linden tree that grew in the front yard of my childhood home. When I was a teenager, this tree grew sick and had to be removed by the city. My family and I were caught off guard by how distraught we were that this tree, a seemingly insignificant thing, would now be gone. I have reflected on this sense of grief and connectedness as a small allegory for how humans interact with their environments, and how to care for our local ecologies on a microscopic scale as an approach to healing our very sick environments.

When considering this topic, I would like to explore how data can be intimate, personal, but also informative. I think this is a good first iteration of this process. I created this model by taking geographic data of every Tilia tree in my childhood neighborhood and mapping that to 3D space. The 3D modeling program Rhino allows for importing CSV data that can be translated to x, y, and z coordinates. So, I used the latitude, longitude, and height of each tree to map these points. However, since these were just points, and not actual poly models, I had to write a simple python script to make each data point the center of a sphere. When loading this sphere cloud to continue modeling and texturing the final product, I decided I liked these objects as leaves, and decided to flatten them out to be ellipses.

A couple of interesting visual outcomes have emerged somewhat unintentionally in this piece. The first is that the data is kind of readable. The way the data was collected, the heights of trees were rounded to the nearest 10 foot, so this creates visual planes that I think are quite compelling in 3D space, because sometimes they are discernable, but at other angles it just looks like a bunch of floating leaves. I decided to accent this “readability” by making four branches, that when perceived from a top down view represent the four points on a compass. So, this data is now graphed out on a very abstract map. Another interesting piece of this is the consideration for interconnectedness between humans and nature. When discussing the significance of local ecologies, it may be an important tool for environmental restoration for small communities to take “ownership", or better yet “stewardship” over their immediate surroundings, which combined into a large interwoven network, means that nearly every human will have a relationship with most parts of our environment. The fact that each data point, or leaf, is represented by an actual tree, but broken down into component parts becomes a smaller piece that makes up a different tree is a conceptually interesting outcome of this representation of data.

Data provided is courtesy of the Village of Oak Park’s Department of Public Works. Special thanks to Robert Sproule.

Below is the 3D model imported from Vectary.com. Unfortunately, the free version limits the number of views, which I did not realize until the last minute. I have included documentation above, and this model below just in case it decides to work.