Reflections – Iris Sylv

What if nature disappeared and had to be reconstructed via entirely human-made processes?

What would art look like if we had never seen nature or only remembered it from long time ago?

Do we have the tools the and capacity to capture the world around us?

How does memory, physical perception and life stage impact our relationship to nature?

How does nature shape our identity and sense of belonging?

If technology is so fundamental to life, what is then natural?

Is there a divide between human, nature and device?

What are the costs and the impact of femininity?

What is the role of tradition in contemporary art?

Does post-digital culture suffocate or revitalize traditional art?

introduction

Reflections is a project about nature, technology, memory, perception, culture and embodied experiences.

It consists of 4 series x 12 experiments, each of which starts as a seed and culminates in a full-grown garden. Currently Series 1 is finished and Series 2 is in progress.

A seed is an impression gathered from a personal photo or a walk in nature, accompanied by a kaleidoscope, a magnifying glass or binoculars. I first hand-paint the seed on a digital tablet and then develop it through a multi-step post-digital process to arrive at the final artwork, or "the full garden".

To create the garden, I interact with a piece of painting software that I hand-coded myself, and that helps me translate artistic ideas into algorithmic structures. Inspired by impressionism, pointillism and the physics of light, this experimental process helps me produce various alternative outcomes for each seed and explore the space between intuition, technology and chance.