At the invitation of photographer Kristof Vrancken (BE - 1982), in the context of the exhibition 'The Sustainist Gaze' (Hasselt - Z33 - summer 2021) - we started working with photo material on the problem of exotic coniferous forests in the mining region of Limburg. The trees were planted during industrialization and served as filler wood for the existing forests and as wood suppliers for the construction of mine galleries and other reinforcement structures.

Due to climate change, the exotics are now falling prey to drought stress and to the typesetter, a voracious bark beetle that is increasing rapidly in numbers given the current climatic (ideal) conditions.

A collection of synthesised videos with the photographic material as the starting point of a PIX2PIX algorithm was made for the exhibition. The typesetter, an agent-based organism, makes characteristic patterns in the inside of the bark. The algorithm parsed that signature and trained a model that served as the basis for another agent-based signature pattern. The underlying idea was to use the signature as a generator for new tree structures.