EXTANT LEAVES
WITH OLIVIA HEUNG
Installation images courtesy of Olivia Heung.
Situating cultural practices of representation and archiving within an ancient geological lineage of mediation and transformation, highlighting human efforts to mark and document the Earth as part of the planet’s collective practice of knowledge-sharing.
Leaves grow, collect solar energy, and fall. Sometimes, a fallen leaf is compressed in layers of sediment and ash. Heat, pressure, and time slowly reduce the leaf’s molecules, leaving only a carbon etching on the Earth’s crust. Fossilization, a process of geochemical mediation, stores the leaf for millions of years—long enough to encounter a species of hominids that trace, photograph, and catalog the fossilized leaf, inscribing and proliferating new artifacts with each successive mediation.
Digital imaging and archiving techniques generate massive ecological databases that are open-access yet largely inaccessible without specialized technical training. Extant Leaves excavates images of fossilized leaves from layers of complex search queries and cryptic cataloging, and reanimates them for our digital epoch. As layers of information collect on cloud servers, and the dust of shredded magnetic tape and integrated circuits build up in our landfills, oceans, and bloodstreams, ancient leaves are reinscribed as digital fossils.
Each image transformation—resizing, alpha matting, color mapping, compositing, saving, copying—imprints a new specimen into the Earth’s nascent digital crust. Melting ice reveals these new digital artifacts, and their careful reinscription makes the ancient intelligence and resilience of plant life tangible and accessible to contemporary humans.
Exhibited at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, titled Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective., curated by Carlo Ratti, in Venice, Italy.