For designers, Nature often serves as a source of inspiration and a reference point. However, man has a complicated relationship with Nature, and the existence of a truly wild and primal Nature is questionable. From bioengineering of seeds to industrial forests, the nature around us is becoming more and more designed. “Applied Nature,” which is presented in Hansen House’s historic laundry building, displays three projects that interact with Nature as raw material. From the project “Interwoven” by the Dutch designer Diana Scherer, who weaves plant roots into graphic patterns, through the “Digital Garden” of Maya Ben David, who scans flowers and reprints them with a 3D printer, and ending with the “Botanics” project by Luca Or, who examines the delicate boundaries between the natural and the artificial using paper flowers and copper
Curators: Tal Erez and Anat Safran
Presenters: Diana Sherer, Maya Ben David, Luca Or
Interwoven / Diana Scherer
In the work Interwoven, Scherer explores the dynamics of the plant’s root system, with its hidden, subterranean life – regarded by plant neurobiologists as the brains of the plants. In his book The Power of movements of plants, Darwin describes the roots not as simply passive growing downward, but as characterized by movement and perception. A root navigates, and knows what is above and what is under,perceiving gravity, locating moisture and chemicals. He discovered that plants are much more intelligent than long has been thought. Scherer applies the “intelligence” of plants in her work and make this hidden subterranean processes visible at all times. In collaboration with biologists, Scherer found a technique to control the growth of plant roots. The natural network of the root system turns into an artificial material. During the growing process the roots assimilate to underground templates and weave or braid the material itself
Digital Garden / Maya Ben David
The digital garden is an imagined garden based on 3D scans and prints of flowers that create a still-life. The actions of scanning and printing distort the original. Similar to still-life paintings throughout history, here too, reality is the starting point. The natural depends on the observer’s perception of it, and it does not faithfully reflect Nature itself. The imagery fulfills the desire to convey the time dimension or existential transience. What is the lifespan of digital material and product? It is transient or eternal? What relations between the natural-human technological will we see in the future? Who created what? And what memory will the new ‘natural’ retain? This work strives to explore the representations and perceptions of terms such as ‘natural’ and ‘artificial,’ in terms of digital time and essence – material, technology, life and death
Sponsored by: Impact Innovation Labs Ltd
Botanica 2 / Luka Or
Out of an enduring interest in the relation between man and natural objects in the current era, designer Luka Or relates to the mechanisms of growth, withering and change in artificial shapes through the Botanica Project. Botanica explores the space between the transient and the eternal, between the natural and the artificial, and between life and still-life, by retranslating flowers into materials that are processed in a way that retains the delicate and transient qualities of the flower, without concealing the transformation that it underwent