EDEN

A garden that is beautiful and strange

What happens to seeing when a new form of intelligence begins to co-write our reality? EDEN asks this question at a real place, the Lüßwald forest near Unterlüß. My photography remains the point of departure, artificial intelligence becomes the tool that lays a second reality into the first. What emerges is not a paradise, but a beginning with a fracture.

Almost a hundred years before me, Albert König drew this very forest, over many years, returning to the same trees again and again. In the bark he saw faces and strange growths. It was this forest I entered for the new work. What König sought with a pencil, I seek today with camera and AI.

Into my real medium format photographs grows an invented flora, hybrid beings of moss, fungus, root, and deep sea form. Beside the forest images stands a herbarium of this flora, single beings held fast as in an old botanical atlas. The same flora from two directions, once in the act of vanishing, once in the act of being preserved.

I neither condemn AI nor celebrate it. For me it is material and tool, alongside camera and movement. What remains in the end are not photographs in the classical sense, but transformations.