The Netherlands – “Artificial Botany” by fuse* art studio
Botanical illustrations were a source of inspiration for fuse* art studio to create Artificial Botany, an art project that pays homage to life and nature using contemporary tools and methodologies.
Artificial Botany is a multimedia installation and ongoing project which explores the latent expressive capacity of botanical illustrations through the use of machine learning algorithms. Illustrations by the greatest artists of the genre – drawn from public domain archives – become the learning material for a machine learning system called GAN (Generative Adversarial Network), which through a training phase is able to recreate new artificial images with morphological elements extremely similar to the original images but with details and features that seem to bring out a real human representation.
A diptych video version of Artificial Botany is one of the works selected for GARDENING, the exhibition curated by Creative Coding Utrecht that is now underway in and around the Landhuis Oud Amelisweerd Museum in Bunnik, a few kilometres from Utrecht.
GARDENING was conceived with the aim of highlighting the balance between nature, man and technology. “Humans and nature are inseparably linked, it’s an ecosystem”, we read in the introducing notes. With the exhibition and a side-programme full of activities, GARDENING, through art and design, "wants to make our changing relationship with nature tangible” and stimulate awareness of each one’s and others’ role in our ecosystem. And all the works on display – the curators underline – “have been carefully selected and together form one ecosystem”.
Opened on last June 1st, the exhibition runs until July 31s.