The Way of Flowers
(2023-ongoing)
13 SEPT 2024 -12 JAN 2025
EXHIBITION
9 UV prints on aluminium, 60x60cm, 2+2AP, 2024
UMWELT
Group show at Fondazione Modena Arti Visive
Curated by: Marco Mancuso
with: Forensic Architecture, Semiconductor, James Bridle, CROSSLUCID, Anna Ridler, Entangled Others, Robertina Šebjanič/Sofia Crespo/Feileacan McCormick, Eryk Salvaggio
The exhibition is topped by a catalogue with texts by Marco Mancuso along with Daphne Dragona, K Allado-McDowell and Laura Tripaldi.
The serendipitous revelations akin to Karl Blossfeld’s intimate portraits of plant architecture are now conjured in the substrates of machine cognition, unfurling a cartography of alien botany ripe for communion.
Blossfeldt’s artistic practice emphasized the close observation of nature to uncover universal forms and structures, suggesting a deep interconnectedness between all forms of creativity, whether human-made or natural.
Emulating his transformative vision, this array of artificial ghostly petals exposes the itinerant beauty of computational botany, fashioned from the intangible textures of data and the delicate intricacies of machine cognition—reminding us that we inhabit a world continuously refashioned by our entwined perceptions. Each piece is a testament to the interplay of algorithm and petal, circuit and sap, is an ode to the inevitable entwinement of organic zest with silicon dreams.
From the UMWELT catalog curatorial text:
“(…) in The Way of Flowers (2023-ongoing) by the duo CROSSLUCID, an entangled system of artificial neural networks paints a series of floral compositions, new formal possibilities arising from a multi-species future, where the alien and the familiar sprout side by side in a process of shared evolution.
The prints in the exhibition are inspired by the huge archive of plants and flowers photographed and published by Karl Blossfeldt in his Urformen der Kunst (Art Forms in Nature) from 1928.
Extolling the planet’s ability to think of universal architectures, the archive highlights the process of mimesis we follow in the construction of many of our man-made structures. Hence, it suggests a profound interconnection between all forms of human and environmental intelligence.
Each piece in the exhibition is therefore an ode to the interweaving of organic matter, anthropic thought and silicon dreams, challenging what we see and understand as environmental intelligence and suggesting a future where the boundaries between natural, human and artificial dissolve, paving the way for ne forms of expression and intra-action.” Marco Mancuso