interactivity is the fact Miguel uses infra-red technology placed behind the “interactor” – the person walking on the floor or standing before the wall – to allow for the person to predicate or “influence” the activity presented on the screen (a person may walk on the floor or wave before
screen and the image will modify, or walk past a digital flower and the flower will bow in that
direction).Think about the effect this has upon the interactor.
First of all, you are standing in front of a screen
on which images are birthing, growing,
interacting, dying, and being reborn – on their
own accord, outside your control. The beauty you are experiencing is both directly physical (you experience before you interactivity without
having to wear virtual reality (VR) glasses) and
intellectual (knowing it is being generated through an algorithm that places the control and creativity in the computer program itself). The very experience causes one to ask the question: what is real and what is artificial?
It is a question asked and answered by others. For example, Jérôme Neutres asked, are these “natures” or “gardens” any less real than the “imaginary” landscapes produced by Nicolas Poussin or Louis-Joseph Le Lorrain – or even the imaginary natures of Henri-Rousseau, who by the way had never seen tropical landscapes outside of Paris’s Jardin des Plantes? His answer, yes and no: “In the era of virtual reality, Chevalier goes beyond those frozen imaginary views of nature to show us generative artificial forms of nature that grow unendingly and change ad infinitum before our eyes.”10
However, it is Chevalier’s answer to that question that proves most informative:
The title of works such as Ultra-nature (2004), Second Nature (2010), and Trans-Natures (2013) evoke an overtaking of the natural frontiers. All these creations – which we can group under the term of “Other Natures” – have as a starting point the observation of the plant kingdom and
its transposition into the digital universe. These
virtual flowers have been inspired by research conducted by agronomy laboratories studying and simulating plant growth. I have drawn inspiration from such research in order to apply it to imaginary plants. The life processes found in each of these works are based on scientific
models developed, for example, by the French National Institute of Agronomic Research
(INRA). My digital gardens use genetic algorithms used in biology, allowing the software to create artificial life
universes that involve developing effects, proliferation, and extinction.
They are the reflection of the world today, where nature is more and more conditioned, calibrated, mastered, and even manipulated. For example, more and more plants and vegetables grow in greenhouses which are totally artificial.
My work examines in a poetic and metaphorical way the question of the link that exists between nature and artifice which coexist and enrich each other today.
My practice is comparable to the botanist, scientist, gardener, landscape artist. But these are flowers of algorithmic light that grow thanks to electronics and electricity. All these flowers compose virtual gardens permanently renewed. It is now possible to create with digital tools a generative world that can change every moment with no limits.
Understanding this deep research and respect,
I am seeking to reveal, with the help of algorithms and mathematics, the poetry of our contemporary world.
— Food Central Kitchen
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