The exhibition Artificial Paradises examines – in a poetic and metaphorical way – the question of the link existing between nature and artifice coexisting and enriching each other today. Relying on a process initiated by the end of the nineties, which is based on the observation of the plant kingdom, and its imaginary transposition within a digital universe, Miguel Chevalier has created virtual plants which appear, grow, come out and die according to their "morphogenetic code”. Those flowers resulting from the germination of digital seeds and generated ad infinitum by computer programs blossom in imaginary gardens, and are projected onto screens. Visitors of the exhibition, whose presence is detected by sensors, develop those movements and events into those gardens. Like Alice who found herself on the other side of the looking glass, visitors are transported into a magical world, in the heart of a virtual, disproportionate and luxuriant nature…
Various installations allow to gather three generations of virtual seeds and flowers for the first time: ‘Sur-Natures’ (2000/2014) whose unusual ballet of plants produce a sensation of digital impressionism, ‘Fractal Flowers’ (2008/2014) – gigantic flowers whose geometry of shapes is taken to extremes and which establish disturbing and familiar relationships with visitors, and ‘Trans-Natures’ (2013/2014) that were presented in vitro in a greenhouse in which grows a vegetal universe composed of constantly changing virtual arborescences.
Fractal Flowers are gigantic fractal flowers of different sizes, colours and shapes. The originality and the might of this creation concentrate on this generator from which we can create a selection of the most beautiful flowers. Through atypic shapes, amazing colours, others artificial paradises are created. Besides, this work leans on a generative and interactive principle, creating autonomous virtual seeds, growing, opening out, fading and reacting to the audience. It reveals stylized flowers, through an extreme geometry in its shapes. We are in front of an intriguing vegetal universe, full of crystal-flowers with a wire frame, reminding of the facets of a diamond, which have on the one hand a real monumentality with its geometrical shapes, and on the other hand an evanescent aspect, when after some seconds, the flowers evaporate in the air like a cloud becoming blurred progressively.
The giantism of this flowers which cast a glance at the visitors, look at them according to their moving, create an enigmatic dialogue with the visitors. Flowers stoop like a bow in order to welcome the public in this mysterious virtual garden, then display their most beautiful colours and shapes, look at them, merge on coloured backgrounds, lean out as to observe close to our reality, to disappear finally out of sight, out of our fascinated look, touched by the living relation with a disappeared virtual object.
These flowers are not only a reflect of sensual and floral romantism, their soothing beauty, fragility and candour, but also a kind of living nature almost animal. The fractal flowers by Miguel Chevalier are huge, impressive, grand through their metamorphosis and colours, a kind of hybrid flowers as you’ve never seen before. Beyond their marginal beauty, Fractal Flowers with their graphic forms, almost mathematical, reveal freedom since each plant is unique through their abstraction and is never the same.
Ultra Nature is a lush virtual garden, made up of eight varieties of luminescent, scalar plants, ranging from herbaceous vegetation and bright yellow flowers with turquoise stems, through to cacti in shades of red and violet. Each plant evolves according to a unique cycle that is defined by its morphogenetic characteristics. Motion sensors allow visitors to influence the growth of the garden's plants. As viewers interact with the artwork, the plants incline to the left or right, creating a scene which alternates between baroque strapwork and stylized organic ballet.
Ultra-Nature is a new digital form of Impressionism. One can feel the cosmic sensibility of Monet, particularly his researches on light, weather and nature, his series such as the famous Nymphéas. This work of art is one image of our world, always facing future and constantly on the move.
