HKDI Gallery

"Artificial Botany" is an ongoing project exploring the latent expressive capacity of botanical illustrations through the use of machine learning algorithms.

Before the invention of photography, botanical illustration was the only way to visually record the many species of plants. These images were used by physicists, pharmacists, and botanical scientists for identification, analysis, and classification. While these works are no longer scientifically relevant today, they have become an inspiration for artists who pay homage to life and nature using contemporary tools and methodologies."Artificial Botany" draws from public domain archive images of illustrations by the greatest artists of the genre, including Maria Sibylla Merian, Pierre-Joseph Redouté, Anne Pratt, Marianne North, and Ernst Haeckel.

Plants are the expression of the creativity of nature: in their apparent static nature, they catalyse the evolution of the surrounding ecosystem in a continuous process of stimuli and responses. Colors and shapes of pistils, flowers and stems, represent flows of information embedded in the development process of the plant itself, captured in the moment of tension between continuous change and crystallisation of the flow."Artificial Botany" works with the intrinsic beauty of this morphological process, encapsulated in the brief moments of transition between one form and another, in continuous change, navigating between the multidimensional space of the neural network.

fuse* collected illustrations from digital archives and used them as learning material for a particular 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 images of inspiration but with details and features that seem to bring out a real human representation. The machine in this sense re-elaborates the content by creating a new language, capturing the information and artistic qualities of man and nature. The interpretation of the learned data aims to create a new system of relationships between colors, shapes, details, and textures totally new and independent from the previous ones, letting emerge the possibility of new species, classes, and morphologies.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Founded in 2007, fuse* is a multidisciplinary art studio that investigates the expressive possibilities of digital technologies, aiming to interpret the complexity of human, social and natural phenomena. Since its origins, the studio's research has had as its primary objective the creation of multimedia installations and performances, produced with the goal of exploring the boundaries between different disciplines in pursuit of new connections between light, space, sound and movement.

Directed by founders Luca Camellini and Mattia Carretti, the studio has evolved over the years and now approaches the creation of new projects with an increasingly holistic approach, relying on a modus operandi that values pure experimentation and collective creativity. The intent is to create works that can inspire, suspend the ordinary and stimulate thought, sensitivity and imagination.

fuse* has always bound its development to that of the community in which it operates by supporting, promoting and conceiving projects that aim to spread culture and knowledge. With this intent, it has been co-producing the electronic music and digital arts festival NODE since 2016. Over the years, fuse* has presented its works and productions internationally in art institutions and festivals including Mutek, TodaysArt, Sónart, Artechouse, STRP Biennial, RomaEuropa, Kikk, Scopitone and the National Centre for the Performing Arts of China.

► https://www.fuseworks.it

An installation work in which, through detection (or sensing), electromagnetic waves imperceivable to humans are made visible and audible. This work was initially developed for the exhibition in Sapporo and has been kept updated. An antenna collects electromagnetic waves, and the data is then made visible and audible in real-time through a massive self-luminous, high-definition screen and speakers. The viewer is able to change the wavelength frequency with a controller, allowing the experience of various simultaneously existing electromagnetic waves through visuals and sound that are perpetually changing. In the present day when electromagnetic waves have become an essential part of infrastructure, this work makes us aware of a phenomenon that usually goes unnoticed - the flow (streams) of a multitude of electromagnetic waves - while also reflecting our active involvement through mobile phones and smartphones.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Ryuichi Sakamoto

Born in 1952 in Tokyo. He made his debut with “Thousand Knives” in 1978 and in the same year he formed YMO. Since the band's breakup he has been active in many other fields. He won an Academy Award for the soundtrack for “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence”, and a Grammy Award for “The Last Emperor”. He often works with environmental and peace issues, establishing the forest conservation organisation “more trees”, among other activities. He was Artistic Director of the 10th Anniversary Program of Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM) in 2013, while in 2014 he took on a more active role in the art world as guest director of Sapporo International Art Festival 2014.

► http://www.sitesakamoto.com

Daito Manabe

Artist, programmer, and DJ. He creates work by combining familiar phenomena and materials perceived anew from different perspectives. His focus is on the essential attraction that phenomena, the body, programming, and computers possess, discovered through their careful observation.

► http://www.daito.ws

► https://rhizomatiks.com

Production credit
Ryuichi Sakamoto + Daito Manabe 
Sensing Streams 2022 - invisible, inaudible 
Technical support:
Visual programming: Daito Manabe (Rhizomatiks)
Software development: Yuta Asai (Rhizomatiks)
Hardware development: Katsuhiko Harada (Rhizomatiks)
Sound programming: Satoshi Hama
Technical setup: Shintaro Kamijo (Rhizomatiks)
Project management: Naoki Ishizuka (Rhizomatiks)
Producer: Takao Inoue (Rhizomatiks)

"The new media are not bridges between man and nature; they are nature" by Marshall McLuhan

In 1974, Nam June Piak, the celebrated artist commonly hailed as the father of video art, brought together television sets and subtropical plants in his work "TV Garden", conceptualising a world interwoven with technologies and nature — a portrayal of the interplay of lives and technologies. Parallelly, renowned media theorist Marshall McLuhan once pointed out that human participation, with the use of electronic technologies, in nature has unveiled a new epoch in culture and history. Such technologies have developed into the breeding ground for new ideas and rules regarding how humankind should contemplate nature, the environment, the order of the universe, the relationships among societies, and even aesthetics. The evolution of technologies has brought prodigious advantages to our lives. To some extent, they seemingly resemble God's omnipotence — revitalising drylands and reversing deaths. Nature and technologies are now in perfect symbiosis, which runs on a reciprocal cycle.

Commissioned by this exhibition, "TTTV Garden" is a pop-up garden. It mimics the agricultural technique widely adopted by indoor vertical farming — the method controls the spectrum of the LED lights in the environment to optimise plant growth. Indeed, TV screen, a medium through which we learn about the world, is a rendition of this very technique. Through learning and analysing the motions and the colour spectrum of the 24-hour news, the computer stimulation transmits and televises such data on the overhead screen in "TTTV Garden", making it the "sky" that not only feeds information to the public, but also provides lights for the plants in the environment. The interaction between virtuality and reality provides a two-way stimulation to lives, resulting in a mutually inclusive loop.

Audience not only can experience this intriguing cycle of co-existence in person, they can also tune in on Twitch, where the plants will be live-streamed and documented continuously; it allows the audience to witness the development of the created sky and growth of the plants in real time, while reflecting on the conflicts and possibilities resulting in the interdependence of nature and technologies.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Keith Lam

Media artist, the co-founder and the artistic director of “Dimension Plus”, a Hong Kong-Taiwanese new media art team, and founder of the composite space "openground".

Being awarded in many outstanding international art festivals, including Prix Ars Electronica and Japan Media Arts Festival, Lam's works have toured around the globe at top-tier museums and art festivals such as the Hong Kong Museum of Arts, the National Art Centre at Tokyo, OK Center for Contemporary Art, the New Technological Art Award Biennial in Belgium, the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts and more.

Lam is also an enthusiastic educator of media art; he has been teaching at various tertiary institutions as a visiting scholar, associate professor and consultant, aiming to promote the application of digital media in art.

► https://keithlyk.net/

It's not a cry that you hear at night
It's not somebody who's seen the light
It's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah
― Hallelujah, hallelujah by Leonard Cohen

"The medium is the message" is a phrase popularised by Marshall McLuhan in his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man published in 1964. Since then, every arrival of new media has entailed new insights. A year after the publication of McLuhan's book, Bauhinia Blakeana was named as Hong Kong orchid. It became the city's emblem and replaced the queen's face on the coins after the handover in 1997.

Despite its name and appearance, the Hong Kong Bauhinia is indeed not an orchid, but a tree in the Legume family, which includes peas and beans, among others. The flower is a sterile hybrid; Richard Saunders, the author of Portraits of Trees of Hong Kong and Southern China, suggested that it was "arguably an inauspicious symbol for a city built upon a mixed Chinese and British heritage." In 2005, Saunders traced down the origin of the Bauhinia Blakeana hybrid by comparing its breeding systems to other bauhinias. He confirmed Bauhinia Blakeana was the product of the hybridisation between Bauhinia purpurea, commonly known as purple camellia, and Bauhinia variegata, usually known as camellia species ― both, according to Hong Kong Herbarium, are alien species to Hong Kong.

It was a miracle that Bauhinia Blakeana was discovered by Jean-Marie Delavay, who was a Catholic missionary and a botanist. The fact that the seeds were not flushed down to the ocean nor eaten by wild animals or humans and that the plant could adapt to the adverse environment such as high temperatures and salty water contributes to the life of Bauhinia Blakeana. So, what does this flower imply in terms of the revelation of life?

Nowadays, we are used to linking almost everything with artificial intelligence and neural network, imagining how the new intelligence will interpret the interplay of existence and essence. If DNA were the language of God, could we decode the DNA for a deeper message from every creature? In the exhibition, the DNA file is translated into sound. There are various methodologies developed in the last 30 years to translate DNA or protein into audible files for various reasons. Some scientists are turning such sounds into songs which can be therapeutic, while others imagine a future where sounds can be altered and reverse engineered to make new materials.

Given that all Bauhinia Blakeana in the city is believed to have hailed from the ancestor tree in the French Mission, Ellen dubs the first ancestor tree "F10ra 0". This Hong Kong-unique "orchid tree" is barren (they do not produce seeds or fruit); they are all grafted and cultivated manually. Botanical studies revealed that Bauhinia Blakeana has a life span of 50 years, suggesting that the "F10ra 0" existed around 150 to 170 years ago, but not earlier as there were only a few inhabitants in Pokfulam.

Based on the 2021 Genome research on Bauhinia Blakeana, we organised the genetic code of protein sequence according to I-Ching in the form of dyadic groups of binary numbers and matrix representations. The information is the foundation for the musical rendition to the story of the Hong Kong Orchid.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Ellen Pau

A video and media artist and professional radiographer, Ellen Pau co-founded Videotage, one of the earliest video artist collectives in Asia in 1986. She is the co-founder and curator of the Microwave International New Media Arts Festival since 1997; and has curated various exhibitions locally and internationally, including Digit@logue for Hong Kong Museum of Art, ZERO1 Biennial in San Jose and Transmediale in Berlin. In the 90s she also took part in film productions with directors Evans Chan, Ann Hui and Barbara Wong.

Major solo exhibitions in recent years include "What about home affairs" (2019) curated by Freya Chou at Para-Site, and M+ & Art Basel Hong Kong co-commissioned video work The Shape of Light (2022) on the video facade of M+. Her video works have been extensively exhibited in worldwide film festivals and art biennials (including the Hong Kong Pavilion in the 49th Venice Biennial) and are archived and collected by VMAC (Videotage Media Art Collection), Video Bureau, Griffith University, Pompidou Centre, M+ and private collectors.

Production credit 
Concept & artist : Ellen Pau 
Producer: Quist Tsang
Installation designer: Umi Ngai
Music composer: Steve Hui 
Programmer: Ko Man Kit 
Assistant programmer: Lee Hoi Yan, Kristina 
Scientific consultant: Dr. Amy Chan, Dr. Chit Chow, Ms. Zeta Mui
Special thanks: Ms. Mandy Wong, Ms. Quinn Wong

“Grove” is a gathering space that offers a vision for inclusive, open building. The project was created by the Living Architecture Systems Group, led by University of Waterloo professor Philip Beesley and with many collaborators.

A pool-shaped screen centers the work, into which a film, called Cradle, is projected. “Cradle” was created by the LASG and Philip Beesley with the Cannes Prize-winning directors Warren du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones. The projection pool is surrounded by a forest of totem-like columns with embedded custom speakers that carry a multi-channel spatial sound environment by composer Salvador Breed and 4DSOUND of Amsterdam.

Together, the film and sound environment offer visitors an intense experience of innumerable worlds falling into chaos and rising again in new life. Inspired by the form language of Beesley’s “living architecture” environments, the film’s intricate geometries move from inert crystalline minerals into surging life forms. Within an astral, dream-like vision of constant metamorphosis, a child-like being emerges, reflecting the fundamental journey from death into new life. Rising and falling in cycles, deeply fragmented wilderness is interwoven with shimmering, hopeful light. Whispering voices emerge from cavernous depths, creating an emotional passage from suffering through new life and innocent wonder.

How will we live together? Beesley and his collaborators offer a vision of a transformed world where future architecture seeks communion with plants, animals, and inert matter alike. Free citizenship was long defined by protective city walls, yet those same walls have also fueled catastrophic changes that befall us now. Instead of the rigid, bounded, and closed territories that divide us, can we live in open, constantly exchanging, shared worlds? Can a new architecture based on dissipative natural forms, such as fragile snowflakes and shifting clouds, create buildings that that are both unapologetically sensitive and extraordinarily coherent, self-renewing, strong, and resilient?

The experimental architecture of “Grove” offers profoundly restorative and healing qualities. By translating complex, interdependent natural systems into projected physical and virtual structures and environments, “Grove” offers a vision of a radically inclusive future where we can mesh our bodies, minds and spirits with our surroundings, breach seemingly unbreachable divides, and create renewed worlds grounded in mutual exchange and empathy.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Living Architecture Systems Group/ Philip Beesley

Multidisciplinary Canadian artist and architect. Beesley’s research is recognised for its pioneering contributions to the rapidly emerging field of responsive interactive architecture. He directs Living Architecture Systems Group (LASG), an international group of researchers and creators. He is a professor at the School of Architecture at the University of Waterloo and the European Graduate School. He has been featured twice at the Venice Biennale of Architecture (“Hylozoic Ground”- 2010, “Grove” - 2021).

The work of the LASG evolves through collaborative exchanges with an international network of scientists, engineers, and artists including engineering leads Rob Gorbet and Dana Kuli, Atelier van Herpen, Salvador Breed and 4DSOUND in Amsterdam, among many others. Collaborations with LASG artists, scientists, and engineers have led to a diverse array of projects, from haute couture collections to complex electronic systems that can sense, react and learn. This experimental architecture explores the subtle phenomena and constantly-changing boundaries at the outer edges of current technology.

► https://www.lasg.ca

► https://www.philipbeesleystudioinc.com/

CREDITS FOR GROVE PROJECT

Principal/Artist
Philip Beesley

Collaborators
Warren du Preez
Nick Thornton-Jones
Salvador Breed
4DSOUND

Design Studio Executive
Timothy Boll, project lead
Matt Gorbet
Rob Gorbet
Lisa Jiang
Michael Lancaster
Salvador Miranda
Anne Paxton
Rekha Ramachandran
Alison Thompson

Design Studio
Adrian Chiu
Kevan Cress
Bianca Weeko Martin
Mike Nopper
Abida Rahman
Mackenzie Van Dam 

Film
Grove Cradle – Philip Beesley
Produced by – W&N Studio & PBSI Studio & Immortal Productions
Curator & Producer – Sascha Hastings
Actress – Tilley Du Preez @ Sylvia Young Agency
Music Composition – Salvador Breed
VFX Creation – W&N Studio & Gavin Coetzee / Studio Tekati
VFX Creation Assistant – Kevan Cress
Editor – Xavier Perkins / Exeeda
3D Scanning – FBFX London (big thank you to Martin Kern)
Z Brush Artist – Chris Everritt
Storyboard Artist – Alex Noble
Motion Capture & Rigging – Mark Maxwell
PBSI Studio Assistance – Timothy Boll, Lisa Jiang, Michael Lancaster, Stephen Ru
PBSI/LASG Operations – Rekha Ramachandran, Alison Thompson, Anne Paxton
Models and LIDAR Location: Meander, Tapestry Hall, Cambridge Canada, with thanks to Scott Higgins

Sound
Composer – Salvador Breed
Text – adapted from Gustav Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1874
Male voice – Philip Beesley
Female voice – Eva Bartels

Contributors
Iris van Herpen
Poul Holleman
Codrin Talaba

Installation Site Management
Poul Holleman/4D Sound
Mackenzie Van Dam

LINKS: Grove Cradle – Living Architecture Systems Group

CRADLE SUPPORTERS: 
CRADLE has been generously supported by Canada Council for the Arts, Embassy of Canada to Italy, HIP Developments, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), University of Waterloo

Joel Kwong is an international media art curator, writer, producer and educator based in Hong Kong. She is currently the Programme Director for Microwave International New Media Arts Festival and the founder of SIBYLS – a creative consultation and production agency. She is an experienced media art practitioner with over 15 years of experience, her most recent involved projects include Microwave Festival edition 2022, Future Media Arts Festival, Connecting the Dots – webzine & online exhibition 2021, Glowing Dots – online exhibition 2021, and Transmedia storytelling projects in 2022 & 2020 in the theme of HALF HALF & All about Life and Death. She has given talks & lectures in different festivals and institutions, including Shenzhen Media Arts Festival, Transmediale in Berlin, Ars Electronica in Linz, ACT Festival in Gwangju/ Korea, AND Taiwan, The University of Electro-communications in Tokyo, Entertainment EXPO in Hong Kong etc. She is currently teaching part-time in various tertiary institutions, includes Hong Kong Design Institute, the City University of Hong Kong and also the Chinese University of Hong Kong etc.

► www.microwavefest.net

Keith Lam, media artist, the co-founder and the artistic director of "Dimension Plus", a Hong Kong-Taiwanese new media art team, and founder of the composite space "openground".

Being awarded in many outstanding international art festivals, including Prix Ars Electronica and Japan Media Arts Festival, Lam's works have toured around the globe at top-tier museums and art festivals such as the Hong Kong Museum of Arts, the National Art Centre at Tokyo, OK Center for Contemporary Art, the New Technological Art Award Biennial in Belgium, the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts and more.

Lam is also an enthusiastic educator of media art; he has been teaching at various tertiary institutions as a visiting scholar, associate professor and consultant, aiming to promote the application of digital media in art.

► https://keithlyk.net/