The artwork Origin connects real-time environmental data from a cacao tree in Indonesia with its digital twin in China. Showing how it drinks, grows and breathes.

This work exposes just how our food system is built on fragile connections.
As cocoa prices explode and global agriculture teeters, this artwork turns a comfort food into a system warning light, pulsing with every drought, breath, and drop of sap.

Origin

The artwork Origin connects real-time environmental data from a cacao tree in Indonesia with its digital twin in China.
The sculpture shows how the tree drinks, grows, and breathes, turning data into movement, rhythm, and light.
It makes visible what is normally hidden in the supply chain .

The work reveals how our food system is built on fragile connections.
As cocoa prices rise and agriculture strains under climate and economic pressure, Origin transforms a piece of chocolate into a system warning light, pulsing with every drought, breath, and drop of sap.

Our food system is starting to break.
Cocoa prices have reached record highs.
In 2024, the cost of cocoa rose above 10,000 dollars per metric ton. Five years earlier, it was 2,500.

That shift is not caused by one event, but by an entire chain under pressure: drought, crop disease, fertilizer collapse, deforestation laws, labor shortages, speculation, and ethical sourcing costs.

The complexity keeps growing. But our connection to the food we eat keeps fading.

Origin is built to reconnect us.

At the ICCRI research plantation in Java, Indonesia, a single cacao tree is fitted with scientific sensors. These measure sap flow, leaf moisture, CO₂ levels, and temperature. The data travels over 4,500 kilometers to a sculpture installed in the Zaishui Art Museum in China.

There, in a space designed by architect Junya Ishigami, the tree’s biological rhythms are translated into a living form.
The sculpture pulses with sap flow.
It dims with drought.
It comes alive again when the tree recovers.

The artwork uses recycled 3D-printed plastics and hand-shaped components to turn complex data into a readable form. Developed in creative dialogue with Ishigami's architecture, the piece becomes a shared space where data, body, and climate meet.

Placed beside a chocolate retail space, the sculpture becomes a mirror.
It shows the distance between a bite of chocolate and the soil it came from. It lets people feel what the farmer feels, not through numbers, but through motion, delay, and light.

Origin transforms scientific monitoring into an emotional experience.
It brings scale down to human pace.
It turns one tree into one story, shared across borders and told in real time.

Commissioned by
Bailuwan Town

Commissioner Lead
Qianhui Xu

Artist
Thijs Biersteker

Architect
Junya Ishigami

Science Collaboration
ICCRI

Production
Woven Studio

Studio Director
Sophie de Krom

Electronics
Bart Kallenbach

Software
Nik Zad (YFX Lab)

Technical Lead
Ian Considine

Recycled 3D Printing
The New Raw

Special thanks to
Theo Rekelhof, Madelief Broekman, Nathan Pottier, Robin Vrugt, Cécile Garcia, Dejan Borisavljevic

THE
CACAO
CRISIS

The cocoa supply chain reveals how the global food system is under pressure.
Climate extremes, crop disease, labor shortages, deforestation laws, currency shocks, and corporate speculation have made the chain between soil and supermarket increasingly fragile. Cocoa is one of the clearest examples. In 2024, cocoa prices rose above 10,000 dollars per metric ton, up from just 2,500 five years earlier. This spike wasn’t caused by one factor, but by the collapse of multiple links in the chain. As the Guardian reports, over 96 percent of the cocoa consumed in Europe comes from regions that are highly vulnerable to climate change. A comfort food becomes a signal light, showing how deeply our diets depend on systems that are reaching a breaking point.

Scientific research institutions are building climate-resilient cocoa systems.
The Indonesian Coffee and Cocoa Research Institute (ICCRI) works directly with farmers to test sensor technologies, monitor cacao tree health, and adapt to environmental change. As part of the global agriculture network CGIAR [https://www.cgiar.org/], ICCRI’s insights feed into global strategies. CGIAR leads initiatives to support sustainable cocoa value chains in West Africa, where the crop faces acute climate risk. The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT , also under CGIAR, focuses on genetic diversity, agroforestry, and ecosystem restoration. These partnerships turn field data into actionable science for farmers and the future of biodiversity.

Origin turns research into emotional impact through real-time data art.
The artwork uses live environmental data from a cacao tree at ICCRI’s research site in Java to animate a sculpture in China, making the tree’s response to drought, growth, and stress physically present. This mirrors the role of the institutions behind it: making the invisible visible, and reconnecting people with the systems that feed them. It is where data begins to speak to the imagination, and where data-driven art becomes a new language for change.

Architect Junya Ishigami designed the Zaishui Art Museum as a near-invisible line across the water, a structure that blurs boundaries between architecture and landscape by inviting wind, light, and rain inside. His philosophy treats buildings as living ecosystems, not static objects. Origin fits seamlessly into this vision. It brings the unseen rhythms of a cacao tree into the space, turning data into movement, light, and breath. As the tree responds to drought or growth, the sculpture shifts in real time, echoing the museum’s own sensitivity to its environment. In Ishigami’s gentle giant, the artwork becomes not just a guest but part of the building’s ongoing dialogue with nature.