Decomposition No. 7:
Undergrowth

Decomposition No. 7: Undergrowth imagines Toronto as a city shaped by what lies beneath it: root systems threading beneath the street grid, connecting trees across the city, and holding the ground where new growth begins. This new immersive artwork reads the city’s street-tree records, including species, trunk diameter, and location, as a score, transforming data built for maintenance into light, sound, and a portrait of slow, ongoing urban growth. 

Continuing Ali Phi’s Decompositions for Computers, this new work treats a series of overlooked civic archives, the City of Toronto’s Street Tree dataset and Natural Feature Projection Area dataset, which log more than half a million individual trees by species, size, and location. From these records, created to document and maintain the trees of the city, grows a new composition, imagining what the city might become.  

Sited for the Canada Malting Silos, once a working monument to industrial growth and now the site of future green parkland, the work reflects the cycles of growth and renewal that shape the urban landscape, while projecting a new, greener possibility for the city. 

As Toronto keeps building on its industrial past, its future may be written as much in root systems and canopy cover as in concrete and steel. Decomposition No. 7: Undergrowth invites us to hear that future now, in the records we’re already keeping.