{Mountains, Trees, Names}*

{Mountains, Trees, Names}* is a procedurally generated infinite landscape collectively created by participants of Find the Tree in Your Name during ITP Spring 2025.

Inspired by Lingdong Huang's {Shan, Shui}* and the Chinese painting A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains, the project explores infinite landscapes through zooming and panning interaction and collective authorship.

The landscape is generated using APack for stamps, Charming.js for trees, and D3.js for rendering and interaction.

In ITP Winter Show 2025, Chloe and I printed out this landscape using Riso and put it on the wall, making the trees tangible.

Here is a video of interacting with the landscape:

Inspiration

I was amazed by Lingdong Huang's {Shan, Shui}*. Although there are tons of details in the painting, I was more interested in the overall composition and the way the mountains and rivers are connected. This kind of long-distance view feels perfect for zooming and panning interaction.

In addition, I watched a musical theatre performance called A Tapestry of a Legendary Land, which is about the creation process of the painting A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains. Since then, I wanted to create something with the yellow, blue, and green colors in that painting.

In my Find the Tree in Your Name project, I collected many trees from participants, so I wanted to visualize them in a landscape.

Process

During Thanksgiving 2024, I explored this idea with triangles. The key was implementing a function triangle(x) that generates a triangle at a given position using uniform and noise-based randomness, then repeating this process across [startX, endX].

Half a year later, I added colors in Daniel Shiffman's Nature of Code class at ITP. I used SVG rendering so gradients were easy to add with radialGradient and stop elements.

Thanksgiving 2025, I moved one step further by planting trees into the landscape using APack stamps and replacing triangles with midpoint-displacement mountains.

After that, Chloe and I experimented with Riso printing and decided to present the landscape in ITP Winter Show 2025. We spent a full night from 10pm to 6am printing around 60 A4 pages.

We ended with blue for mountains, orange for trees, and green for stamps.

For each page we printed multiple copies as backup. Below are process photos and a short video.

Then we put them on the wall.

Final result:

Reflection

I really like this project. While it is not technically complex, it creates a rich intersection of generative art, data visualization, and physical printing. What fascinates me most is that people who plant trees become part of the landscape itself. The creators are embedded in the creation.

Thanks

Huge thanks to Chloe, Sai, and Christoff for all the help, photos, and videos.