Unseen Flora is a series that reimagines the world of botanical illustrations through the lens of AI. It shines a spotlight on the fantastical and surreal botanical illustrations created by four fictional British scientists and artists, having at its core the exploration of the idea of post-truth contextualised in the contemporary digital age.

For this series, we created a series of 8 unique audiovisual pieces thanks to the collaboration with the Italian studio Cinello. Cinello’s patented technology of digital artworks (DAW) allows to blend the physical with the digital, offering an encryption method to safely store digital artworks on custom monitors and frames.

Inspired by the digital collection of Unseen Flora, we created eight pieces with different characteristics: Unseen Flora .TW01 features surreal botanical illustrations inspired by Theodore Winslow, a botanical artist with a mysterious legacy. From military service to living among native communities, his detailed illustrations of undiscovered tropical plants represent an important step forward in this field of research.

Technically, these works have been created while experimenting with a new pipeline using some animations from Artificial Botany previously created with a styleGAN model. We tried to control that model with a specific network able to extract information out of one image and connect it to Stable Diffusion, which in turn generates the subsequent image on the basis of the information collected. The styleGAN animations result in an ever-lasting interpolation between images, together with the ability of Stable Diffusion to add new elements and features each time.