Feed a Digital Forest on the Eiffel Tower with Your Heartbeat

Grow a tree on the Eiffel Tower, feed it with your heartbeat, and help fight deforestation in one riveting interactive installation.

by Beckett Mufson

May 27, 2015, 10:45pm

All images courtesy of the artist, via.

The Eiffel Tower will glow green with interactive projection-mapped plantlife at this December's United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris. For a project called 1 Heart 1 Tree, artist, architect and projection mapping pioneer Naziha Mestaoui is planning a benevolent takeover of the city's major landmarks to send the UN a strong message about sustainability and deforestation in modern policy. "The aim is to reconnect us with ourselves, others and our environment and give the power to anyone to act to change the world," she tells The Creators Project.

Participants all over the world will be able to connect to the installation through the 1 Heart 1 Tree app, covering not only the Eiffel Tower but the Gare du Nord and potentially the Arc de Triomphe with their own personal saplings. Detected through the cameras on their smartphones, users' heartbeats feed the projected flora, while a suggested donation of about nine dollars or more funds the planting of a real tree to fight against deforestation and support agroforestry projects in developing nations. By planting at least 180 trees this way, 1 Heart 1 Tree will cancel out the carbon footprint left by the 60 projectors and nine miles of wire that bring the public installation to life.

Mestaoui has chosen this hybrid form of interactive installation as the next step in her long career as a projection mapping artist. As one half of the duo Electronic Shadow with Yacine Aït Kaci, she has been designing laser light spectaculars, spoken at a panel at The Creators Project events in Paris, and projects like One Man One Tree, a digital forest built with the same ethos as her new project.

Today, Mestaoui launches a Kickstarter campaign in the hopes of making 1 Heart 1 Tree a reality. We spoke to the projection mapping artist about her creative process, her beginnings in the field of projection mapping, and how she earned permission from the Presidency of France to incorporate the Eiffel Tower into her work.

How did you first come up with the idea for 1 Heart 1 Tree?

My passion is to connect opposites such as virtual and real, invisible and visible, nature and technology. As an artist, I think art is a good way to share and give the possibility to each of us to do something. 1 Heart 1 Tree is a people based project introducing a pioneering model that allows one of the most collaborative approaches in taking action for the planet. The inspiration came from the Amazon. Since 2011, I have spent more than a month per year with the tribes learning their ways of living and thinking. They have deep consideration for nature and I believe that these ancestral cultures can inspire our future. I love a painting made by someone in Ashaninka tribe that shows their belief that the tree is a spirit with intelligence and with which they can communicate and exchange thoughts and ideas.

The environmental issue is one of the biggest challenges we are facing. And trees play a major role to combat the greenhouse effect, save and clean water, provide habitats for wildlife, and are also a source of life, energy, and intelligence. Amongst the amazing beauty of nature, the life behind nature and the culture of the tribes, the A-ha moment was when I experienced the sad view of smoke instead of landscapes from the plane, due to fires from deforestation, when we were flying above the Amazon. We’ve been witnessing for many decades these huge destructions but if we act together, we can protect and even recreate life!

Through art I want to give each of us the power to act and inspire our future. 1 Heart 1 Tree started by the artwork 1 Beat 1 Tree in 2012, an indoor experience that took place in Rio during the United Nations Earth Summit. A physical space made out of 15km of elastic wires creates a 3D screen, in front of this screen there's a sensor, and each time someone stands on it, a seed of light is created. It gives birth to a unique virtual tree, that grows in front of them. Then the virtual tree grows in real life, planted in a reforestation program. So the virtual becomes real, the immaterial becomes material, it’s a tree and it has a long-term effect. Since then, the artwork toured in Europe, Asia, South America and already resulted in the plantation of more than 15,000 trees.

Today is the next step with 1 Heart 1 Tree that I created aiming to create a monumental artwork by projecting virtual forests on Paris' famous monuments, and I am already planning to do a world tour on the most famous monuments on the planet. 1 Heart 1 Tree is a collective artwork that plans to involve everybody to be part of this project and feel responsible and act for the next generations. The aim is to plant millions of trees. We have 30 plantation programs all over the world in collaboration with many associations.

What kind of tech is going into the project?

I have always been fascinated by technologies and sciences to better understand and change the world. This is why we invented a patented 3D interactive video mapping technology, a technique at the crossroads of spatial and imagistic art, in 2003 during my researches under the artist name Electronic Shadow, in duo with Yacine Aït Kaci. We had then the chance to be recognized as pioneers in the art of the digital age.

The artwork 1 Heart 1 Tree will use this technology and I am going to project 3D images of growing trees onto the Eiffel Tower by using 30 video projectors. The same work will be deployed onto the Gare du Nord and the Arc de Triomphe (we’re still waiting for the authorization on this monument). If we have the three monuments, we'll need about 60 video projectors. The electricity consumption of 1 Heart 1 Tree corresponds to a roundtrip travel from Paris to Rio for 8 people and it will be compensated with the plantation of 180 trees. The crowdfunding campaign will help us develop the application, allowing each participant to the project to plant a virtual tree on the Eiffel Tower.

By putting their finger on the phone’s camera, their heartbeat is being recorded and sent to a database. We use an algorithm that analyzes the chromatic micro-changes due to the blood circulation through the finger. Then they can see the tree with their name or a word of their choice on it, growing at the rate of their heartbeat on the monument. As each heartbeat is unique, each tree will also be totally unique. The entire 3D environment will be calculated in realtime on a central server getting all the information from the database fed by the phone application; the heartbeat rate, the name of the person, the location of the real tree… to generate a unique virtual tree.

Getting the French presidency to endorse projection mapping onto the Eiffel Tower for an art installation doesn't sound easy. How did you manage to get permission?

Since the very beginning, three years ago, I wanted to create this concept as a collective and citizen artwork and I created the indoor version. Nobody asked me to do this project, but I started to work one year ago on the idea of projecting on the Eiffel Tower for the COP21, so I presented the project to many people and they were always really enthusiasts. Everybody wants to contribute and make it possible to happen. This is the amazing story of this project. Since the beginning, I have the chance to be supported by ambassadors such as Nicolas Hulot. Of course I had many meetings with the city of Paris, and many meetings with the Eiffel Tower team, it has been a long process. Now 1 Heart 1 Tree has been officially approved on the Eiffel Tower and the Gare du Nord and is supported by the United Nations, the Mayor of Paris and the French Presidency. The authorization for the Arc de Triomphe is in progress. We're crossing our fingers.

How did you choose where to plant the project's trees?

I chose plantation programs that have a social, environmental, and a biodiversity impact. On one hand I have agroforestry projects, bringing the trees back into the agriculture, and changing the mentalities, cleaning the air, the water, bringing back biodiversity. The other category of projects is reforestation. The planted species are always local and multiple. We have 30 different plantation projects on five continents. The followup to the trees across the world will be ensured by Pur Projet, a NGO specialized in the development of agroforestry projects, in collaboration with many NGOs and foundations in charge of the plantation. Each co-creator of 1 Heart 1 Tree is going to receive a Google map localization of the parcel they contributed to plant and a picture of the species planted for them. Every six months for three years they’ll receive information about their tree and the evolution of the plantation program. I have been working with Pur Projet since 2012 and they are doing an amazing job—[to Pur Projet] Thank you again for being a partner of 1 Heart 1 Tree.

How do you hope people react to the public installations? What's the over all goal, or point, of 1 Heart 1 Tree?

It’s a citizen project before everything. It's not about ecology but about us, our humanity. We’re part of an interdependent system. And the aim is to reconnect us with ourselves, others and our environment and give the power to anyone to act to change the world.

And doing it using technologies also shows that the future we’re heading to is the one we create. On one hand we have the relationship between man and technology and on the other hand we have the relationship between man and nature, and these two axes are very often in opposition. The idea is to reconnect them, creating a dynamic giving the possibility to inspire our future. We have much more freedom than we believe, and our technologies do not necessarily disconnect us from nature. It’s up to us; our creativity and imagination is the limit.

**What's next for **1 Heart 1 Tree?

After the COP21 in Paris, I plan to bring 1 Heart 1 Tree all over the world, transforming famous monuments into virtual forests from Sidney to Dubai, Beijing to New York, Rio to London… And of course, I plan to connect it to more and more plantation programs in the world.

And after 1 Heart 1 Tree?

For now, I’m concentrated on 1 Heart 1 Tree and launching an international crowdfunding campaign from the 27th of May until the 2nd of July, giving the possibility to each of us to be a co-creator of 1 Heart 1 Tree and then to act. We all want to feel responsible and ask ourselves what we can do. The destruction is [happening] really fast, but if we manage to act together we can have a huge impact. Entire forests can come back to life with water sources reappearing and lots of animals in just 15 years.