You can interpret this painting in different ways. I think the title is a pretty straight forward example of one arbitrary point of view. But my inspiration came from a walk I once took in a park in Taiwan. It was in 2015 and I saw every tree wore a metal label with a qr-code on it. At that time I didn’t scan the code and I don’t know if the all qr-codes were leading to the same website, but I fantasized that every tree had it’s own website where they were showed the highlights of their lives.
More recently I was thinking about the trees we have planted in our town. Until half a century ago trees were part of cities and villages. They were part of the street furniture and nobody was particularly bothered or particularly pleased with them. They were just in the background of every outdoor scene. As time went on, trees slowly became annoying objects that got in the way of developers. They were removed and no one cared. Not until the background of every scene started to change. Something got missing. In large parts of cities trees became rare and people start to realize their importance again. And at some point trees became objects whose preservation even had to be fought for. They were seen again. Some lucky trees were given conservation status. They get listed in computers. Watched. And numbered. What means nowadays trees indeed have a ‘site’ in the digital world with their own little data.