Imagine books as transformed trees. Some live only for a year, others for ten years, some stay alive for centuries. What would a graft of such a tree look like?

Grafting Trees takes quotes about trees from existing works. Depending on the algorithmic choices, these grafts grow fast or slow. In this work, each graft is defined by its gardener, who is present with a short biography scraped from Wikipedia. A graft is realized in Python by replacing a random noun by its definition in Wordnet. This grafting method is inspired by Oulipo’s constraint of Littérature définitionnelle. The graft grows during three following seasons. The growth is indicated in bold. The speed of the growth is dependent on the presence of the nouns in Wordnet.

Grafting Trees was published as number 37 in the online digital literary magazine sync edited by Andreas Bülhoff. sync looks at topics of digital reading, writing, conceptual literature and post-digital publishing. It was also presented as part of the algoliterary exhibition Data Workers in March 2019 at the Mundaneum in Mons. The work was reworked in French as Greffage des Arbres and was part of the exhibition Littérature et Numérique at La Maison du Livre in Brussels in October 2020.