CLAUDIA LARCHER
The Great Tree Piece, 2022/23
2K experimental film, partly made with Artificial Intelligence
sound by Ursula Winterauer
9 minutes, 30 seconds
Claudia Larcher’s experimental video, The Great Tree Piece, made with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence, addresses our complex relationship with both the natural world and technology. It consists of a single shot exploring the crown of a tree to its roots, deep underground. Traversing a macro to micro perspective, the video exposes an imagined world of humus, fungi, and roots, the brain of the tree and the supporting life of a forest ecosystem. Larcher asks: What makes a tree a tree? What form can an encounter with it take? And what does the tree itself have to do with what we see?
Inspired by 15th century artist Albrecht Dürer's watercolour painting The Great Piece of Turf, which reveals the roots and dirt below dandelion and grass, Larcher’s video is a modern take on an endlessly fascinating subject. In her video, puzzle-like bark shapes are multiplied by AI until a fantastical landscape emerges, revealing the rich materiality of the tree. Zooming in from the macro view of the tree to an increasingly close-up view of a bumblebee with its individual cells and fluids, the imagery becomes almost abstract.
As research by Dr. Suzanne Simard and other scientists has confirmed, “trees are connected below ground via a vast fungal network, and trees interact with their own and other species, including forming kin relationships with their genetic relatives. In mapping the fungal network, their research has shown that these highly connected hub trees, also known as Mother Trees, share their excess carbon and nitrogen through the mycorrhizal network with the understory seedlings, which can increase seedling survival. In this way, Mother Trees act as central hubs, communicating with the young seedlings around them. In a single forest, a Mother Tree can be connected to hundreds of other trees.”[1]
Larcher’s revealing artistic rendering of the world hidden in and beneath this one tree serves as a greater message about the wonder and importance of the natural world. Her work bears witness to the embodiment of a leaf’s inner movement, and the rustling, crackling, and whispering soundtrack offers a suggestion about what the life of a tree might sound like. The Great Tree Piece reminds us of our deep kinship, and thus responsibility, to trees.
Artist Biography
Claudia Larcher is an artist, experimental filmmaker, and AI researcher based in Vienna. Treating photography as a socially entangled, politically charged practice, she extends the still image through algorithmic animation, video, and immersive “phygital” installations. Her current research interrogates the materiality of data, ecological futures and bias aware artificial intelligence, contributing to international debates on digital humanism and posthuman image culture.
Recent solo exhibitions: Extinction Stories at Recontemporary, Turin; Hallucinations at the Austrian Cultural Forum Prague (both 2025); Hallucinations at Engländerbau, Vaduz (2024); and Still Lifes 3000 at Brahaus, Clervaux (2025). Earlier exhibitions include Show & Tell at Anthology Film Archives, New York, and Faux Terrain at the Ars Electronica Festival, Linz. Her work has also featured in group shows, including Rear Window & Real Wonder and Vienna Today – Activating Futures at HOW Art Museum and The Hai Museum of Art, Shanghai, and Imagine AI for Dignity at NIROX, South Africa (all 2025), alongside CIVA – Contemporary Immersive Virtual Art at Belvedere 21, Vienna (2024) and Extensions of Self Francisco Carolinum Linz (2023).
Larcher’s practice has earned numerous honours: the Austrian Art Prize (2023), Beate Sirota Gordon Award and City of Vienna Work Grant (both 2024), the “Short Film” Jury Prize at Rencontres Internationales Sciences & Cinéma Marseille (2024), the Outstanding Artist Award for Video and Media Art (2016) and the Kunsthalle Wien Prize (2008).
Her work is documented in four monographs: Hallucinations (Verlag Moderner Kunst Wien, 2024), Rooms (De Gruyter, 2019), Baumeister (Bucher, 2013), and HEIM (Kunsthalle Wien, 2008) – and in numerous essays and catalogue texts.
[1] https://mothertreeproject.org/about-mother-trees-in-the-forest
The Great Tree Piece, 2022/23
video still, 2K experimental film, partly made with Artificial Intelligence
sound by Ursula Winterauer
9 minutes, 30 seconds
photo courtesy of the artist