What happens when you train an artificial intelligence on the plants in a greenhouse — and then ask it to imagine their future? This question is at the heart of it Data Trees Transformationan AI art installation by le_Brimetcreated in collaboration with Gencork and with sound design by Marcus Amadeus for its second edition Future Days 2025 in Lisbon.
The result was one of the most quietly disturbing works presented at the festival: a piece about climate change that didn’t lecture or alarm, but invited you to stand still, touch something real, and feel the weight of what we’re about to lose.
©Future Days
©Future Days
©Future Days
©Future Days
©Future Days
©Future Days
Data Trees Metamorphosis: Two Gateways, One Conversation
The facility was built around a deceptively simple architecture: two interconnected portals. The first was digital — an animated video screen displaying an ever-changing AI-generated carousel of vegetation, forms that morph and adapt in response to imagined environmental pressures over time. The second was natural — a regenerative cork surface grown with Gencork, textured and raw, carrying the smell of the material itself.
Between these two portals, visitors found themselves suspended in an immersive soundscape composed by Marcus Amadeus that made the transition between digital and physical seem less like a boundary and more like a threshold. The logic was precise: the AI had been specially trained on photographs of plant species from the greenhouse at Estufa Fria, the host site Future days that yearand then asked to extrapolate — to speculate about how these species might change, adapt or disappear over decades of climate-driven transformation.
The result was not revelatory images or data visualization. It was something stranger and more moving: a kind of botanical conjecture, moved, smothered in the smell and grain of cork.
Pixels you can feel
Le_Brimet — who defines himself as “(re)generative, holistic and exploratory computational designer” and the originator of the concept of ArtCreTech, a symbiosis between art, creativity and technology — has spent the last decade working at the intersection of physical space and digital systems. His practice is based on a specific belief: that the transformation of data into sensory experience is not only aesthetically interesting, but also ethically necessary.
“It’s easy enough to use pixel intelligence and do interesting things in the digital world, but it’s hard to feel it. It’s hard to touch“, he explains.So my idea with this installation was to make this bridge. Climate change is like a wake-up call, not only in terms of environmental issues, but much more. I’m a creative person, so it means it’s mandatory, in my opinion, to be able to present ideas and ways of thinking. You can use art to scream at society.“
This phrase – “scream at society” – is worth sitting with. Because Data Trees Transformation he doesn’t scream. He whispers. And that, arguably, is what made it work. In a festival program dense with panels, workshops and future talks, the installation offered something different: a pause, a texture, a question you could hold in your hands.
The artist as an ecosystem
Le_Brimet’s wider practice offers important context for understanding why this piece landed as it did. A pioneer of production systems and parametric design in Portugal, he has participated in major international design events in Milan, Paris, London, Copenhagen, Eindhoven, Stockholm and beyond. His awards include two Red Dot Design Awards, three German Design Awards, a Green Product Award and the Rising Talent award at the Stockholm Furniture and Lighting Fair 2019. In 2024, design magazine FRAME named him one of the “Ones to Watch” — a recognition of emerging digital creative minds shaping the field worldwide.
In 2024, he also formalized his thinking into ten principles of (Re)generative Computational Design – a framework based on critical reflection on his own practice and oriented towards All includedrobotics, 3D printingand new sustainable materials as tools for reshaping design culture. Data Trees Transformation is this context visible: technology not as a spectacle, but as a means of care.
Cooperation with Gencork — a company that works with regenerative cork — was no accident. Cork is a material with its own ecological history: harvested without cutting down the tree, it is one of the few industrial materials that is actively beneficial to the ecosystems from which it comes. Placing it next to an artificial intelligence that imagined the future of plants created a quiet but intense dialogue between the regenerative practice that already exists and what we risk losing if we don’t expand it.
The right audience, at the right time
Festivals are unpredictable environments for art. Tracks can get lost in the noise of programming or find themselves caught between the wrong speeches and the wrong crowd. Data Trees Transformation found its audience. People stopped — between panels, between workshops — to interact with it, drawn by the contrast of the cork surface’s texture and the hypnotic quality of the display.
“I think of people as an essential part of my facilities,“le_Brimet reflects.”Future Days curates an ecosystem that approaches the future as an active, lived practice in the present, so it felt like a perfect opportunity to share my ideas with the public.”
This alignment between work and context is what elevated it from installation to conversation. Data Trees Transformation asked his guests to consider not just what the future might look like, but what it could be—and what it might smell like, if we pay attention. At a time when the design world is seriously considering its relationship with ecological systems, this is a question worth asking. Repeatedly, and in as many forms as possible.
