Third Nature

Relational Ecology. How does technology filter our perception of nature and the land, and what forms of life will take root within these increasingly mediated landscapes?

Third Nature is a living artwork consisting of fifteen native and non-native mature trees planted in a grid formation derived from the plug-in systems used to generate natural elements — trees, plants, rocks — within CGI and virtual modelling software. The work explores the idea of ecological simulacra, investigating how virtual possibilities, abstraction, categorisation, standardisation and circulation of environmental forms inform the real world: the spaces we inhabit, the landscapes we map, construct and occupy, and the ways we perceive and represent nature itself.

As the boundary between the synthetic and the organic continues to narrow, technological and scientific advances continue to shape how we experience the world. The project reflects on complex relationships between the natural and the artificial, the real and the romanticised, the native and the extracted, “us” and the “other.”

When looking through the digitised collections at University of Cambridge, we came across 18th-century architectural and landscape masterplans “for laying out Cambridge” by Capability Brown, the influential landscape designer who fundamentally transformed perceptions of the British landscape. Brown became known for radically reshaping entire environments — moving forests, lakes, and earth to create carefully choreographed vistas that appeared effortless and untouched. Yet for all their apparent naturalism, these landscapes were highly constructed: a simulacrum of an idealised “first nature” that would come to define European Romantic ideas of the picturesque.

During our research period at the University we were also given access to the Herbarium collections, including specimens collected by Charles Darwin and other explorers, many of which have not been seen publicly. Encountering these archived plants — some of them now extinct and now stored in cardboard boxes and wrapped in newspapers from countries that have since disappeared, been renamed, or reclaimed — made us think deeply about systems of taxonomy and classification. The archive revealed how botanical knowledge has long been shaped by colonial science and utilitarian forms of categorisation, where land and ecology become understood, ordered, and ultimately conquered through maps, archives, naming systems, and scientific categories. These practices of naming, mapping, and classification – driven by institutional and geopolitical power – have historically transformed landscapes into legible, extractable resources, establishing authority over what counts as knowledge and how the natural world can be used – truth through classification and surveillance.

Looking through these plans and collections prompted us to think about how landscapes are shaped, organised, and represented — not only physically, but culturally and politically. We began considering the use of datasets in landscape visualisation and regeneration, alongside the expanding libraries of editable materials, objects, and environmental assets that can now be endlessly inserted into virtual worlds. Plants are treated as detached from indigenous ecological systems and transformed into portable scientific data. We became interested in how these increasingly ‘universal’ yet bias forms of landscape representation can create a distance from material places, and how technological systems shape the ways we perceive, depict, and ultimately construct environments.

Third Nature probes questions of environmental abstraction and visibility and probes connections between traditional botanical archives, rooted in imperial systems of science, and contemporary CGI datasets. Although separated by centuries, both approaches often reduce plants to isolated, atomised units, making land easier to catalogue, manage, aestheticise, and commodify. In doing so, they privilege Euro-American ideals and landscape conventions, and flatten the ecological and cultural specificity of place.

Third Nature develops the idea of relational ecology in contrast to the abstracted logic of digital tree libraries and environmental databases. Rather than framing nature as a universal, searchable, and endlessly transferable resource composed of isolated units, the project foregrounds the interdependent relationships between land, ecology, history, technology, labour, and culture. It considers how plants have historically been detached from indigenous ecologies and transformed into portable scientific specimens, taxonomic categories, and environmental assets through colonial systems of knowledge and representation. In response, landscape is understood not as a neutral or decontextualised environment, but as a relational field shaped by overlapping social, ecological, political, and material conditions. 

It asks: Which plants are chosen to be digitised? Which ecologies become commercially valuable assets? Who owns scans of biodiversity? And ultimately, who profits from the representation of the environment? 

Nature as a stage set. The placement and typology of trees in Third Nature mirror those of their digital counterparts in the software plug-ins. The placement does not bear any meaningful connections to botanical taxonomy or contextual relevance nor does it follow any coherent order according to naming, heritage, character or simply form.

Each tree in the artwork, between 4m and 15m tall and anything between 10 and 30 years old at time of planting, is routed at the centre of a 9 by 9m square filled with differently textured grass and surrounded by white gridlines. These gridlines are constructed of white marble setts that, in their arrangement, mirror the self-same, reflective geometry of Superstudio, the artistic pioneers of dystopia and the idea of nature as a technological substrate.

The choice of trees was based on creating the most incongruous collection of ‘representatives’, a combinate of different shapes, colours, origins, cultural and botanical significance.

The search for the right trees was supported by the head gardeners from the Cambridge Botanic Gardens whilst a Cambridge based nursery provided support to source the species across the UK and Europe.

The realisation of this permanent artwork was preceded and accompanied by a one-year research period which enabled a myriad of exchanges with Cambridge based writers, researchers and scientists from the fields of AI, Botany, Digital Humanities, cultural, physical and environmental geography including practitioners involved in the forestry sector as well as the British Antarctic Survey. Some of these exchanges have now developed into current and future collaborations. 

Third Nature opens September 2024.

Third Nature was commissioned by the University of Cambridge as part of a site and context specific art program developed by the Contemporary Art Society.