Erin Robinson
Flora Synthetica
Peckham Digital, UK, 2024
Interactive installation, Generative AI, real-time graphics, TouchDesigner
Flora_Synthetica is a participatory digital installation exploring flowers as material for building non-traditional creative archives, conceptualising speculative botanical archives of the future where materials are gathered through creative interpretations of memories in response to eco-collapse. The installation is situated in the space between organic reality and digital representation, where participant drawings of flowers submitted through a web interface are transformed into 3D hybrid botanical/digital structures existing in a cybernetic form. These floral structures are analysed to additionally display similar flowers from the physical world, exploring the link between human memory and digital realisations of natural entities.
This exploration is inspired by Baudrillard's Simulacra and hyperreality, viewed from a posthumanist framework, speculating the transmutation of floral identities into digital avatars in virtual spaces. This echoes the concept of hyperreality, where digital representations extend beyond simulations to create a new, autonomous reality, where digital environments might not just mirror but also augment or replace our interactions with the natural world.




