Every year to celebrate the festive period, the Victoria & Albert Museum of London commissions a designer to create a Christmas tree for the Museum’s Grand Entrance.

This year, the installation is conceived by stage designer Es Devlin. The Christmas tree takes the form of a cloud of floating words, contributed by the Museum’s visitors. This spectacular and innovative tree features digital word projections that create a poem. Accompanying the tree is a layered polyphonic soundscape of human and machine generated voices.

Over the two weeks in the lead up to installation of the tree and throughout the Christmas season, visitors were and are invited to contribute a festive word as they enter the V&A and online. These are combined and processed through text and sound algorithms to create this polyphonic poem sculpture. The tree is created in collaboration with video designer Luke Halls, creative technologist Ross Goodwin, creative agency Sunshine and music and sound collective Res.Lab.

Es Devlin’s The singing tree will be on view throughout the Christmas season until Saturday, 6 January 2018.