Sophi Gardner
Flow and Echo
Flow and Echo
Flow and Echo
Flow and Echo
Flow and Echo
Flow and Echo
Title: Flow and Echo
Date: 2021
Medium: Plant generated digital artworks
Artist: Sophi Gardner
Exhibition: Blue Sky Gardening, 2021
From press release:
Sophi Gardner of Flow & Echo seeks to re-enchant people with nature through creative technology. She is currently developing work at the intersection between botany and generative digital art. This work seeks to give visual form to plants living capacities and sensitivities, and to explore how these correlate with our being. Her works include a generative digital piece where a plant is painting live as it goes about its daily activity, of photosynthesis, and of water and other elemental exchanges across its surface and within it. She shows printed images created by living plants and also of imaginal visions of Mecklenburgh Square Garden trees and natural features where their biodata is explored visually. She visions indoor interactive gardens in empty street level spaces, to renature our experience of the everyday. She wants to reimagine our technology’s place in our evolution, from disparate and warlike in relation to the natural world, to a melded integrated bioaware, responsive and responsible kind of synthesis.
From artist:
At the Blue Sky Gardening exhibition I converted the Mecklenburgh Garden greenhouse into an experimental digital botany lab. Images were created onsite by houseplants. Electrical data was taken from the surface of their leaves where thousands of tiny mouth like pores (stomata). These essentially allow them to feed on light and air, inside them water and nutrients are flowing and exchanging from cell to cell. This data was fed into coded environments where the plant behaviour generated artworks including direction, speed, size and colours of creative elements and so we saw drawings made by botanical life. Every 5 minutes the code reset and the plant began a new painting. We also saw biodata mapping across a topographical digital surface creating waves.
I also produced imaginal visions of what Mecklenburgh Square Garden trees and natural features could look like if I tapped into their biodata and projected visuals created by them. There is a constant undercurrent of breath, life and change in the botanical world and we can visualize these and experience them together. Creating a kind of outdoor nature art cinema. I imagined that screens can be made in all sorts of shapes and projectors could display what is happening with the plants and trees with sculptural features reflecting something more of what is alive.
Additionally I showcased images of indoor interactive gardens in empty street level spaces, to renature our experience of the everyday in a new kind of way. Reimagining our technologies place in our evolution, from disparate and warlike in relation to the natural world, to a melded integrated bioaware kind of synthesis with us fully integrated, a renewed part of it, more sensitive, responsive and responsible.
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