​PLANT

Debora Hirsch

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Following the protocols of blockchain technology, which create a digital record designed to resist destruction, manipulation, and the passage of time, I decided to bring plants threatened with extinction to life and preserve their representations within the realms of artificial intelligence and physical painting. In my research project, PLANT, endangered species are recorded on the blockchain, acquiring an enduring virtual existence and becoming a symbolic memory of what we risk losing.​ Blockchain cannot preserve a living species or the ecological relationships that sustain it. It can preserve an image, a name, and an act of attention. PLANT occupies the distance between these two forms of survival: the continuity of the representation and the possible extinction of the organism it depicts. The digital record persists, while the living referent remains exposed to time, human action, and environmental change.

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Plants have long embodied the transitory nature of life and death. Across cultures, they have also signified fertility, prosperity, regeneration, and renewal. Yet biodiversity is neither timeless nor self-restoring. It arises from intricate relationships among organisms, climates, soils, waters, and human communities. When these relationships are disrupted, their loss may be irreversible. Entire systems can be diminished before their complexity has been understood.​ The history of botanical representation is inseparable from this tension. Centuries ago, European paintings, engravings, and illustrated books presented the landscapes of the Americas as exuberant and seemingly inexhaustible. These images recorded wonder, but they also served the practices of classification, appropriation, and possession. Plants became specimens; forests became inventories; territories were translated into resources. A landscape represented as boundless could more easily be imagined as endlessly available.

​The New World was also depicted as a wild environment awaiting cultivation, conversion, and control. If the artists and naturalists who created those images were to revisit many of the landscapes they recorded, they would encounter radically altered territories. Forests have been replaced by monocultures, pastures, roads, mines, real estate developments, and expanding cities. The abundance preserved in historical images now stands in uneasy relation to environments marked by extraction, pollution, deforestation, and biological loss.​ Representation therefore becomes a form of evidence. It reveals not only what once existed, but also how the natural world was seen, ordered, and made available for use. The image can preserve the memory of abundance while also carrying the history of the forces that contributed to its disappearance.

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Frames, caves, forests, architectural fragments, landscapes, and monolithic birds are arranged in deliberate interdependence. If one element is removed or displaced, the composition may cease to hold together. This formal vulnerability recalls the equilibrium of an ecosystem, in which the disappearance of a single organism can alter relationships extending far beyond it. The image becomes a provisional ecology, sustained by the coexistence of its parts.​ These environments do not describe the specific habitats of the represented species. My plants know no borders. They inhabit imaginary territories assembled from different geographies, temporalities, and systems of representation. Botanical forms coexist with architectural remnants ands and invented organisms, creating worlds that are internally coherent but impossible to locate. The plants occupy these worlds with unmistakable visual authority. They are the protagonists of the scene, although I do not seek literal botanical portraiture. Different moments in a plant’s seasonal life may appear simultaneously. Flowers, fruits, leaves, seeds, and branches are brought together within a single moment of observation.

​To construct these worlds, I assemble datasets from botanical, historical, scientific, and cultural sources. I use them to fine-tune artificial intelligence models capable of generating a multitude of visual possibilities. From these outcomes, I select, transform, paint, and combine fragments into compositions and animations. Artificial intelligence does not determine the finished work. It expands the field of possible forms from which the work can emerge.

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My choice of plants depends upon several interconnected factors: their conservation status, history, cultural significance, practical or medicinal uses, causes of decline, and visual particularity. Each species opens a distinct chapter, while the project remains intentionally unfinished. New plants can continually enter the collection as knowledge changes and other species approach the threshold of disappearance. PLANT does not propose that an image can substitute a species or that technology can repair what ecological destruction has undone. It asks instead what kind of memory an image can carry, and whether sustained attention might become a form of action. Through beauty, complexity, and imagined harmony, the project seeks to make perceptible what is being lost: not only individual plants, but the relationships, histories, memories, and possible futures that disappear with them.

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