Aubrey Birdwell

Alpha Tree (2025) is projection-mapped sculptural video installation by artist Aubrey Birdwell. It extends the artist's work exploring themes of language, erasure, and architectures of disappearance. In Alpha Tree, archival public-domain footage of the 1946 Bikini Atoll nuclear tests is algorithmically translated into a living field of multilingual glyphs. A non-exhaustive selection of nineteen language sets is used, each contributing three unique characters from different regions. Different language characters are folded into the animation with each loop.

The imagery of the mushroom cloud from the Bikini Atoll footage is aligned with a hand-drawn tree silhouette designed by artist Shelly Farnham of Seattle, WA, and was used with permission as a stencil for the animation. The contrast between the two images forms a composite between constructive and destructive forms. Throughout the animation, glyphs drift, collide, and fade along the tree’s body, creating a slow, recursive memorial that never resolves into a single language. Rendered using code, Alpha Tree reimagines the screensaver as an elegy. The work reflects on language as a form of growth, an emergent ecology rising from digital ash, where traces of conflict feed new roots of collective voice.