From three felled sycamores to Money Trees

The Money Trees project started with a shock.

“It kind of started when three 100 year old sycamore trees got cut down behind my flat,” Rachy explains.

Those trees were not just background scenery, they were neighbours. When the chainsaws arrived, she linked up with community group Notice This Tree to protest. That moment of resistance grew into a multi year artwork and campaign.

“The Money Trees project is something I have been working on for a few years now, it started at my masters,” she says.

Money Trees invites people to visit trees in London that are at risk of being cut down. You go to the tree, take photographs from different angles, upload them, and those images are turned into detailed 3D models.

Under the hood, it is a clever pipeline. Photos are sent to Rachy via Firebase, then processed in a programme called MetaShape to create point cloud models. These digital trees can then be turned into digital assets on the blockchain, linked to a pot of money for real world care.

“If the tree was cut down then the money would go back into planting a new tree, or it would be put into watering the tree and looking after the tree,” she says.

Challenging how cities value trees

When Rachy began researching how trees are valued in London, she came across the CAVAT style system used by councils and consultants, where a tree’s monetary value depends on location, footfall and carbon sequestration.

“There are trees in, for example, Soho that are worth 1.6 million pounds, so you have to pay that fee to cut it down,” she explains. “Whereas in other areas such as the trees I was talking about at the beginning, they were worth nothing, so they can just cut them down for no fee whatsoever.”

Money Trees asks a radical question:

What if communities could increase the value of a tree through care, attention and technology, so that it becomes harder to cut down

On the Money Trees website you can “snap a tree”. A cloud shaped guide appears on your screen so you capture a particular angle. Each visit adds another view of the same tree. Hundreds of images are stitched into a 3D model and plotted on a GIS map, building a living, visual record of London’s threatened trees and the people who love them.

Kalpana’s path: from guerrilla gardening to digital commons

If Money Trees begins with a loss, Kalpana’s journey begins with resistance and sowing seeds.

“I am a guerrilla gardener and a technologist and a nature rights campaigner. I am also a trustee for the National Park City,” she says.

Her route into nature was through regenerative agriculture and farmers rights in India around 2018. When she returned to London, many parks and green spaces were closing or being neglected.

“A couple of my friends and I started to guerrilla garden in our local neighbourhoods and our streets,” she recalls.

At the same time she was teaching herself to code. Out on the streets, talking to neighbours and community gardens, a pattern appeared.

“Everything was functioning in so many silos and a lot of these groups were not speaking to one another,” she says.

That realisation led to the social enterprise nowadays, and to a mission that runs through all her work:

“How do we decentralise a lot of these tech tools and put them in the hands of the people and get everyday citizens to become not just consumers but also ecological citizens”

Kalpana points out how mainstream platforms are designed around consumption, not care.

“When you use Google Maps and ask it to take you from point A to point B, it takes you through the most commercialised route in order for you to again extend yourself more as a consumer as opposed to an ecological citizen.”

Their work, she says, is about building different mapping systems and different relationships with technology, so people are guided to green spaces and community needs rather than to the nearest shop.

Technology as ecology, not enemy

Neither Rachy nor Kalpana are interested in a simple “nature good, technology bad” story. Both talk about naturalising the machine and treating technology as part of a wider ecology.

“I do not really see nature as separate from us, I see nature as we are nature and we are all one,” says Rachy. “If we are talking about these machines, can they just be another species in and of themselves”

Her practice has ranged from painting to working with scents, bacteria, fungi and mycelium sculptures. Learning to code was just another medium.

Kalpana picks up this thread.

“In the industrial revolution we mechanised nature. I think our job now, as we move into a new technological era of the symbiocene, is where nature and technology can work together to create a liveable world,” she says. “We need to naturalise the machines that we are living with now.”

She often talks about technology through an ecological lens – as a form of entanglement.

“We are so conditioned to seeing urban and nature as completely polar from one another, or nature and technology as something polar, when all of these are entangled extensions of each other because we are all interconnected,” she says.

Instead of ceding power to “big tech”, both artists want more people to build, hack and repurpose tools that reflect their own values and local realities.

“We have always had technology,” Rachy says. “Technology is fire.”

Glitch: a cyber gardening tool for ecological citizens

One of the practical ways this shows up is through Glitch, a web based tool developed by Kalpana and her collaborators.

“Glitch is essentially like a cyber gardening tool,” she explains. “It is a web based platform where citizens in London can learn how to garden and have access to the nature skills, the tools and the knowledge to understand what species are growing around you.”

On the map, green dots show “cyber gardens” mapped by citizens. These are linked to real world spaces, and Kalpana is working with organisations like the National Trust and ecological restoration partners to plant out those species on the ground.

Glitch has a fictional character at its heart.

“Glitch is essentially this fictional character that you get to co design a garden with,” she says. “When you go on the platform it asks you the different reasons why you might want to create a greener space or to grow a garden.”

It is designed for people who feel they have been deprived of nature knowledge by the systems they have grown up in.

Kalpana references Professor Peter Kahn’s concept of environmental generational amnesia – the idea that each generation accepts a more degraded environment as normal.

“What we consider to be normal nature in our cities now is not what people our age 50 years ago would have understood as wild nature,” she explains. “That is declining with every new generation.”

Glitch tries to close that gap by making nature skills accessible and playful again, using the devices people already have in their pockets.

Tree Goji: a Tamagotchi for your local tree

If Glitch is a cyber garden, Tree Goji is a cyber pet with roots.

The idea came when Rachy noticed tags on street trees in Hackney reading “Water me please”. Councils did not have enough capacity to water all the newly planted trees through hot summers.

“My idea was to start hacking Tamagotchis,” she says.

She connected hacked Tamagotchi toys to moisture sensors in the soil around specific trees.

“The Tamagotchi would then light up and tell you that the tree would need to be watered,” she explains. “Your tree is tied to a specific tree within your area, so you look after that one tree basically.”

It is playful and serious at once: looking after a digital character is directly linked to looking after a living tree on your street.

Data rights for trees and forests

As more of the natural world is scanned, mapped and modelled, questions of data rights come to the surface.

Money Trees uses data from Tree Economics and publicly available tree coverage datasets, though species level detail is still patchy.

Kalpana points to projects like Terra0, where a forest was LiDAR scanned and tokenised as an NFT, linked to live satellite data. If the forest’s temperature rose above a certain threshold, the NFT would burn itself. It was an experiment in giving a forest its own decentralised, self governing system.

“When we are talking about nature rights and protecting ancient wild trees in the city, how can we also protect the data rights that go into the technology build of it,” she asks.

If data is the new soil, who owns it, who extracts from it, and who benefits

“All of our data as humans is barely protected out in the world,” she says. “How can we also start to protect the data rights of nature, especially as we are continuing to build it in this digital cyber world”

Multisensory worlds and more than human solutions

Towards the end of the conversation, an audience member reflects on the sensory power of plants. The first time he smelt an onion flower in a rooftop garden, something shifted from doom scrolling numbness to joy and curiosity.

“The more we are connected to this phone, there is a part that we are missing,” he says. “That sensory, that touch, that feel.”

Kalpana responds with a concept from the writer Ed Yong and the zoologist Jakob von Uexküll: the Umwelt, the sensory bubble each species lives in and uses to construct its own world.

“As a human species we have what we think are five senses, but we actually have over 500,” she says. “Our main sense that has been capitalised on is our visual sense, and you see that through technological design.”

What happens when we design technologies that honour smell, touch, sound and proprioception as much as sight

She cites studios experimenting with multisensory storytelling, and the famous example of the Japanese rail system whose efficient layout took inspiration from the behaviour of slime mould.

“For a crisis that spans across generations we need multi generational solutions,” she says, quoting her friend Russell Reed, then adds: “For a crisis that spans multiple species, we need multi species types of solutions.”

The message is clear. Technological solutions will not come from humans alone, but from paying attention to the intelligence of other species and the ecologies we are entangled with.

Children, classrooms and healthier tech

Both speakers are keen that these ideas are not kept in art spaces and lecture halls. They already work with young people, bringing Money Trees and Glitch into schools and youth projects.

“I have done workshops with children with Money Trees,” says Rachy. “Taking them outside to scan trees, use these different technologies and then bringing them back into the classroom and doing that analogue thing of painting the 2D textures and then remapping it onto a 3D model.”

At the same time, they stress the need for regulation and redesign of mainstream platforms, which currently overload our nervous systems.

“A lot of our digital systems are designed to trigger our prefrontal cortex, so we are always in this fight and flight motion when we use too much screen time,” says Kalpana. “We need more of that rest and digest, and it goes back to the multisensory part of how we connect to our surroundings and to ourselves and our bodies.”

Using technology differently is as much about policy and design as it is about hacks and artworks.

So what next

If there is one line that captures the spirit of the conversation, it might be this:

“We have got a responsibility as citizens and as people who live in cities to not just protect our natural areas and our green spaces but to also help restore it.”

For Rachy and Kalpana, that responsibility is joyful, imaginative and experimental. It looks like:

• Scanning and painting trees so that they carry community value online and off

• Turning Tamagotchis into soil sensors for thirsty saplings

• Building cyber gardens that teach you how to plant the real thing

• Treating phones and platforms as tools you can rewire, not just feeds you scroll

At the end of the event, Kalpana invites people to scan a QR code and try Glitch in their own neighbourhoods, starting with London and then, hopefully, other cities.

“The more people use it, the more that helps us reach that,” she says.

Rachy reminds everyone that her Money Trees animation will be playing later, and invites people to her solo show in Bethnal Green at the end of November.

“I am also on the internet, you can find me, and you can also look at Money Trees online,” she smiles.

Between them, they sketch a different kind of future, where we do not have to choose between nature and technology, but learn to live as ecological citizens in both worlds, caring for trees, data and each other.