Artist statement

Vinca minor is the botanical name of the lesser periwinkle, a plant humans cultivate for decoration. I could not be there. I sent something in my place: a computer and a screen, set on the ground between two rocks, in the middle of a forest. The screen is a portal. It opens onto a virtual periwinkle growing alone in a square of lawn, inside a warehouse it never leaves. Sending a plant into a forest that already holds thousands of them serves no purpose. I work very hard to build useless systems, then set them down beside the thing they claim to imitate. If the work seems disconnected from the site, it is: the plant is shut inside its room, I am elsewhere, and the only link between the two is a screen losing against the sun.

The starting point is an absurdity: setting up a computer outdoors, in the middle of nature, knowing full well that the screen will never compete with the sun. And then showing a plant on it, surrounded by thousands of plants.

The periwinkle comes from a game engine. It is a piece of set dressing, built to look real and to go unnoticed. I left the model alone: I tampered with its materials until they confessed their digital nature. Each section of the plant is held in place by forces I deliberately mistuned: they answer one another, spiral, and eventually blow the simulation apart (the principle of audio feedback). A dilation of time slows that collapse down, not the way video slow motion does, but by altering the passage of time inside that world.

All of these parameters sit under my fingers, on a MIDI controller. At first I thought I was performing a synthesizer. I now think I am gardening: I do not control the plant, I adjust its environment, and I listen to what it does with it.

A gallery is an artificial device: it guarantees in advance that whatever stands inside it will be received as art, and therefore that it will shock no one. That guarantee produces a tolerance. We extend exactly the same tolerance to simulations: we forgive their imperfections because the frame has warned us that these are only images. Here there is no frame. There are two rocks.

What is left is a chain of fragile things: a simulation that collapses, a machine left outdoors, a network asked to carry an image out of a forest, a screen losing against daylight. The forest depends on none of it.

We bring the living down to our own scale and our own rhythm (the potted plant, the square of lawn, the warehouse with its emergency door). We grant ourselves the power and the responsibility of reproducing nature faithfully, and we barely manage to refer to it. I am not judging this reflex: nature inspires me, I am part of it, and I go to enormous trouble to build a system that serves no purpose.