In 2021, Maya Lin planted 49 Atlantic white cedar trees, each blighted by saltwater inundation, in Manhattan’s Madison Square Park. Ghost Forest was the name of the project; it was, in typical Lin fashion, part sculpture and part memorial—a symbol of the power of the natural world and a reminder of its precarity in the face of climate calamity.

But while the rest of us were looking up at Lin’s forest, the artist found herself staring down, wondering about the activity of the trees below the soil’s surface. Now, she is going one step further to visualize her trees’ subterranean behavior—and she’s turning to the world of NFTs for the first time to do it.

In June, Lin will release “The Secret Life of Trees,” a series of generative art NFTs that recreate, through complex algorithms, the organic growth patterns of root systems underground.

“When I was creating Ghost Forest, I was thinking about how each tree, through its root structure, begins to communicate with one another,” the artist told Artnet News in an email. “This project stems from that realization of how beneath the soil, tree roots begin to grow and intertwine and communicate with one another, forming a hidden and intricate living interconnected system below the earth’s surface.”

Hosted by Pace Verso—Pace Gallery’s crypto art arm—and minted by the generative art platform Art Blocks, Lin’s NFTs will take the form of little seeds. But they won’t stay that way for long: outgrowing roots will quickly transform the digital artworks into what Lin calls “unique, multi-stemmed organisms of differing colors.”

“I was interested in exploring organic growth patterns in computer-generated works, which tend to be based more on fractal patterning and being much more geometric in aspect,” she said. “I was very keen on exploring a more organic living growth pattern and one that with each seed, will reflect a unique timeframe in which that seed grows. Some will grow quite slowly, encouraging owners to hold on to them and be patient as they grow.”

Lin’s project is one of three Pace Verso plans to release this spring and summer through its ongoing partnership with Art Blocks. The first of the bunch is “PRELUDES,” an experiential NFT series by Trevor Paglen that combines graphic visuals with music inspired by composers like John Cage and Iannis Xenakis, who experimented with algorithms in their own work.

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