This artwork was first conceived of in 2014 and was sold as an NFT to fund the physical fabrication of the artwork, and to track the ownership of the physical artwork. The sculpture consists of a found segment of a tree root that was unearthed in California, alongside a high resolution digitally fabricated metallic copy of itself. They are presented simply on 14” (35cm) slabs of steel. As time has passed, the tree root has decayed slightly and weathered through time, while it’s digital twin remains frozen in a moment.

Entropy refers to the process of decay, and degree of disorder in a system as thermal energy becomes unavailable for mechanical work over time. Extropy is often used as an antonym to entropy, and is sometimes used by the transhumanist movement as a philosophical term that encapsulates their desire to extend their life indefinitely by fusing with machines and becoming immortal.

The tree root was found in Santa Barbara, California and had been unearthed during a construction project in a garden. I captured a high resolution (100 micron) 3D scan of the tree root using a state of the art multi-laser 3D scanning system. These systems are typically used for reverse engineering industrial parts, and so the digital twin contains some artifacts due to the flaws of machine vision and algorithmic reconstruction failing to capture the complex surface of the natural object.

The digital file was then mirrored, and 3D printed out of solid nylon using a selective laser sintering manufacturing process and finally electroplated in rhodium giving it a reflective metal finish.