The Sylvan Grove was created as a special, collaborative installation for the House in the Woods art show at Passable in the Fall of 2025.
Because this art show was a fundraiser for Passable — a makerspace that fosters interdisciplinary collaboration at the intersection of art and technology — the Sylvan Grove was a showpiece that illustrated all that is cool about new genres of generative art created by creative technologists.
For this project, at Passable we created several 12 foot trees — the grove — and then invited artists to projection map animated imagery onto these trees.
The art show was divided into two main spaces — the Cabin in the Woods, and the Sylvan Grove. As event participants emerged from the cabin in the woods, they stepped into this other-worldly, surreal forest. This spooky environment honored the prevalent Halloween trope of a permeable membrane between the living and the dead — the in-between, upside-down, dwelling of ghouls and spirits. In our case, we added a new twist, each tree’s projection and the animated sky were designed to convey that participants are now in a digitized underworld, where the rules of physical reality no longer apply.
Light art projections were created by Joseph Gray, Aubrey Birdwell, Cole Devoy, and Grant Hinkson. Overall concept design and trees by Shelly Farnham.
Aubrey Birdwell’s Tree
Joseph Gray’s Tree
Tree turns pink
Now it’s a party!
For those interested in how we made the trees, here are a few more images telling the story! At Passable we always like to share more about the process.
Shelly first drew the trees, and then scanned them into Illustrator to vectorize. There was actually a lot of math required to fit these trees onto the CNC router, and the design had to be tweaked a few times for them to cut out properly.
After Shelly Farnham drew and vectorized the trees, she then cut them on our new 4×4 bed CNC!
We painted the4x4 panels white. Thanks JJ for all your help with fabrication!
Here the trees are almost assembled, each a flat white silhouette ready for projection mapping. They are mounted on posts with reinforced kick plates at the bottom.