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.

Artist bio

Erin Robinson is a computational artist based in London whose work primarily involves the design of automated and interactive visual systems. Her work critically engages with the concepts of posthumanism and postmodernism, reflecting an evolving relationship with technology by underscoring blurring lines of between organic and non-organic entities, reality and virtuality, self and otherness, exploring notions of authenticity and existence in the digital anthropocene and the embodiment of machines in creative and non-creative processes.

Her work spans multiple mediums including computational drawing, installation, film, sound and performance using a variety of tools including AI, data science, robotics, 3D and digital photography.