Digital Nature @ Design Museum Den Bosch
My work ‘Algorithmic Nudibranch’ was included in the Digital Nature exhibition at the Design Museum in Den Bosch.
Curated by Bao Yao Fei and produced in collaboration with DEMO festival, the exhibition was on display from October-January 2023.
About Algorithmic Nudibranch
While generative models are a powerful way of imagining objects & spaces that don’t exist, they’re also a way of examining the embodiment and physicality of certain concepts through their representation in the dataset. As a way of probing tensions between fuzzy organisms and man-made industry; I enjoy prompting the model with both biological and computational terms to see how the materialities of these distinct worlds meet, interact, and juxtapose each other.
Part of the prompt for this work was ‘nudibranch’ which are aquatic creatures that I adore because of their blobby shapes, extravagant vibrant colors, and other-wordly presence. The prompt also included carbon and lithium – 2 elements that are omnipresent in our electronic devices and feel in many ways the opposite to the nudibranch: silver, hard, and cold. 
Techniques used included: Disco Diffusion v5.16 based on Katherine Crowson’s fine-tuned 512×512 diffusion model accessed through Google Colab.
About Digital Nature
“The Young Design Team is proud to present A Digital Nature – DEMO at the Design Museum Den Bosch. The presentation shows a selection of animations themed around digital nature: wondrous underwater worlds, alien plants and dream landscapes with digital flowers. They are enticing images that also force you to think: have we entered an era where digital nature has become part of biodiversity? Are we looking at beautifully colourful digital corals in the same way we look at faded reefs in Australia? Does the experience of digitally designed nature create a stronger connection to physical nature? The work of leading studios, designers, budding talents and art school students from around the world takes you by the hand, then shakes you up.”
