Rick Van Melis created Trees of Life, a beautiful and interactive art installation that allows visitors to connect with the 2 trees and bring them to life.

The art installation features over 9,000 LEDs controlled by 8 Teensy boards using the Fast LED library. Each tree is a separate system. It has 6 hands and 12 ‘arteries'(LED-Strips) 2 out of each hand. These start at 1m50 and go 5 – 7,5m high.  Basically when untouched the tree and its arteries are in a restful idle animation. Users however were able to wake up the tree by placing their hands on the “hands of the tree” (hand shaped touch pads), when this happens the 2 arteries connected to the corresponding hand will start pulsating with ‘energy’.