alter_florescence is a speculative intervention in the function of a hypothetical evolutionary machine that is infinitely regulating the morphological features of a virtual flora species. The code assembles and re-assembles its virtual habitat over a series of generations, as seen through the projected lens of the machine. As the system attempts to evolve the plant population towards its ideal target,altering agents emerge to skew the machine’s optimizing calculations. Taking the form of nocturnal luna moths bestowed with mutagenic powers, these critters transform the flora species into newly adapted variants.




This work is a response to research on the historical co-mingling of evolutionary Science and Capitalism, and the normative perspectives this union places on human and non-human species. Genetic algorithms are typically used to solve complex optimization problems in corporate and capital contexts. These algorithms are mathematical adaptations of the biological evolutionary processes described by Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Seeing these algorithms as proponents of cultural homogenization and a limiter of non-essentialist perceptions of nature, alter_florescence imagines an alternative world where machine calculations never resolve, systems remain in perpetual and dynamic flux, and populations flourish abundantly in their vivid variances.

Inspired by Donna Haraway’s tentacular thinking and speculative fabulations, Deleuze and Guattari’s nonlinear rhizomatics, and Karan Barad’s transmaterialities.