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“Silvia Ruzanka speaks with Gabriela Vainsencher”

This year the New Media Artspace presents two solo exhibitions by Gabriela Vainsencher and Silvia Ruzanka. Each addresses process from an expanded perspective, extending from artistic and psychoanalytical processes to botanical and computational processes. In conjunction with Ruzanka’s exhibition, Vainsencher interviews Ruzanka as the second part of a two-way dialogue between the artists on their works in relation to these and more ideas.

Gabriela Vainsencher: With the easy availability of digital tools that create rich, hi-res environments, you still choose to create work that is so low-res, it looks ancient in web-time. Can you talk about this choice?

Silvia Ruzanka: One of the things that has always stayed in my mind is the extreme distance between the art that was on Atari game cartridge boxes and the visuals of the game itself. Because the technology forced a minimalist aesthetic. As videogame technology approaches closer to that realistic representation, we do lose poetic potential of those minimalist visuals. For example, physically-based rendering, or PBR, creates a certain representation that is considered realistic and high-fidelity, and therefore true. Though it’s the default in tools like Unreal Engine, this kind of rendering defines only one kind of aesthetic, which helps uphold specific ideologies. The fact that this is built in to a lot of the programs that we use makes it easy to replicate without questioning. 

I return to types of imagery that are personal entryways to experiences of wonder. For me, one of these is a nostalgia for a time defined by the newness of technology. I think about returning to that state, that feeling that the technology was a material that I could engage with in a conversation, rather than just something that produces or replicates my desires; and of a kind of open horizon of possibility. It was also a time when the interface and the underlying code were closer together, with less distance from the material nature of the technology; but also with material constraints that inspired creative problem-solving. 

GV: Can you explain the correlations between the visual and audio elements? tones=landscape/background, noise=subject/movement?

SR: We forget about technology until it breaks, or fails to act as intended. We forget about the hard drive until we hear the sound of its mechanical failure – the “click of death” – and then we remember how much the digital realm is dependent on physical material. As I was recording these sounds, I was thinking of it as a soundwalk through the material structure of the technology. There is some correlation with some of the imagery and the sounds, both entering as kinds of interruptions. I think of both the audio and visual elements as creating atmosphere, more than about specific representational connections.

GV: There is a stark contrast between static and dynamic elements in the video, and between tone vs. noise in the audio. Are the dynamic elements apparitions, miracles, or just once in an eon chance events?

SR: I like “apparitions”! Apparitions are slippages, reminders that the world as we know it is not necessarily categorizable. The static and dynamic is a reminder that we are in oscillation between both a thing and a process, both defined and undefinable, in a fixed form in the now but also in a constant state of becoming. It’s one of the reasons I’m drawn to plants. We think of plants as being static, fixed in place, but they are constantly in motion, just on a different time scale. Noise is a reminder that meaning is a slippery concept, that it seems concrete but it’s diffused.

GV: The images suggest some form of digital life: either seeing life as mechanistic and computational or imagining life created in silico as opposed to in vivo. How do you conceptualize the relationship between life and computation/information?

SR: There’s a long history of ways of trying to understand life in mechanistic terms: modeling computers on human thought, or thinking of the human mind as a computer. But what if we could go in a third direction? What form could computation take if we began with a completely different kind of life-form and a radically different kind of thought? This led me to plants and to plant-thinking, which opens up very different notions of what information is, how information is processed, how intelligence is structured, how meaning is made. In the drive towards general AI, we are trying to replicate human intelligence. But what if, instead of making everything about shaping the world to work within our language, we were to work within the language of computation, or the language of other non-human entities? I think it would have to begin by listening to other ways of being.

GV: Both the visual and audio seem to be based on synthesizing a world from very simple materials. Can you talk about your relation to the building blocks of sound and video and their symbolic power in the worlds you build?

SR: I’m interested in how these elements of plant life and of electronic and computational elements might begin to merge, interconnect, break down and re-form. Donna Haraway’s idea of compost is inspiring to me: a process of mixture (of materials, ideas, relations), that requires maintenance and care, that incorporates both decay and life. What would a digital compost be? Can we consider the idea of compost as a way of writing and maintaining code or digital systems? For me, the visual and audio elements may take on symbolic meanings, but they are also about glitch, about representation and language decaying and reforming.

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“At Vegetal Velocities, or Coded Coexistence”

Curatorial Statement by Katherine Behar

The New Media Artspace is proud to present Silvia Ruzanka: Botanical Computing, a solo exhibition of digital animations from an ongoing cycle of interdisciplinary new media artworks. At the New Media Artspace, Ruzanka’s science fictional animations are accompanied by digital ephemera and analog research materials, which shed light on how she simultaneously conceives, creates, and theorizes her Botanical Computing world. The collected works imagine environments where organic and human-made beings coexist in mutuality and even hybridity. In Ruzanka’s speculative world, biological and computational processes might generate life, and Jewish principles of caring for the natural environment as stewardship might manifest. Botanical Computing pays tribute to such potentialities in circuits of plants, air, breath, word, language, code, and care.

Botanical Computing coalesces layered accretions of three different scales of time—technological time, botanical time, and human time—within the time of creation, which in turn includes the creation of meaning, the creation of life, and the creation of art. The online exhibition uses shifting colors and sunderings of the interface to destabilize human time, melding time periods and temporality. The design of the website contrasts contemporary 3D rendering with pixelated references to 1990s World Wide Web culture and early 2000s net.art. As human viewers peer into Botanical Computing’s worlds, they may encounter “easter eggs”—hidden elements of the interface that reveal failed remnants of abandoned past projects predating the artist’s present iterations. Further incorporating artistic process across time, the in-person exhibition includes Process in Bloom, four evolving research collages—created with the New Media Artspace Docent Team—that unearth continuities between botanical and technological patterns as form, structure, and content. Mixing in yet another timestamped reference to 1970s scientific illustration, these elements draw a connection between the processes of technological and biological growth, and the creative process artists engage daily, through which a creative world buds, morphs, withers, and blooms.

In Botanical Computing, Ruzanka positions the special potentialities of care and cultivation against the trope of depressive overdetermination that is frequently attributed to technological futures. To break through the truncated imagination of overdetermination, Botanical Computing reaches what we might call a “vegetal velocity,” as though breaking the sound barrier or in the language of Star Wars science fiction accelerating into “hyperdrive” to achieve lightspeed. At this velocity, Botanical Computing summons audacious hope for coding new forms of coexistence.

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In Botanical Computing, four tableaus each represents a stage—or in the artist’s term “dream”—excerpted from an ongoing body of work of the same title. Ruzanka’s animations stage glimpses into a world devoid of human life where technological and botanical beings grow in lush harmony, cultivating care for each other across species lines. Each view onto the Botanical Computing world stretches time, its denouement reflecting ongoing cycles. Scenes employ static shots, perhaps in reference to conventions of landscape painting. Yet belying the unmoving camera, minutia mount into vicissitudinous evolutions, perceived slowly at first, then with mounting velocity and expansion.

In the first dream, Plant Growth Dreams, we look through an aperture surrounded by darkness, reminiscent of a microscope lens or ship porthole. In the glowing center of the screen, we witness microcosmic growth and evolution in fast-forward, like cells dividing. Plant Growth Studies questions how something—anything—evolves toward complexity. How does anything come to be? At times the rapid pace of the animation recalls the rhythms of timelapse, reminiscent of educational films in a science classroom. Coupled with a green-hued color palette, the timelapse style summons 1970s nostalgia. In other moments, the too-loose over-averaged rendering quality reads like Google’s hallucinatory Deep Dream, an image-generating artificial neural net, evoking the creepiness of AI meme culture in the here and now. Across the entire animation, the aperture is interlaced with green diffusion patterns. The green color could be interpreted as being vegetal like leaves or as being digital like a blinking command line cursor. Yet the diffusion pattern oddly conjures hand-crafts like the patterns of cross-stitch, reintroducing the human sense of touch like a ghost in the machine.

The second dream, Still Running, is an homage to the 1972 science fiction film Silent Running, which Ruzanka cites as a major source of inspiration. In the film, Earth has become so polluted that the only remaining forests are in artificial biospheres aboard spaceships. Abandoned in space in the last forest, a botanist teaches his only companions, robots called “Drones,” how to care. The robots learn to care for the forest, cultivate plants, and tend the botanical world as its only surviving stewards. Ruzanka’s Still Running imagines the how the relationship between a tree and its robot drone caretaker would evolve years after the movie’s end. We see one of the unmistakable drones from Silent Running watering the biosphere forest with a silly watering can just like in the movie. Beside it grows a giant tree, but this tree is unlike the forest trees in Silent Running which exactly resemble trees on Earth. Unlike Earthly trees, this tree’s branches support twigs that look like LEDs, leaves that look like microchips, and fruit that looks like resistors. What the tree’s branches have come to bear isn’t botanical; they bear nothing short of a resemblance to the tree’s closest companion, the drone. Through caring, coexistence becomes coded and cross-coded, and the botanical and technological grow so close as to intermix.

Remarkably, this closeness comes to animated life in Still Running when the tree takes steps toward and eventually bows over the drone. This bending over and leaning toward literalizes a form of recognition that in her theoretical work Ruzanka seesas essential to both caring and thinking as acts that contain potential. Citing the German philosopher Martin Heidegger who wrote, “we truly incline toward something only when it, in turn, inclines toward us,” Ruzanka recommends that we “think of this inclination as a force of possibility that needs an engagement with other forces in order to be enacted.”[1] And so, by inclining toward a drone, a tree becomes something beyond its tree self and what it would otherwise ever have been.

The third dream, Memories of Care, represents the introduction of language into the world of Botanical Computing. Emphasizing the centrality of text, Memories of Care portrays a biological world created through computational processes. That is, created through lines of code—which are precisely language. The animation depicts hands tenderly planting seeds, but as Ruzanka explains, the hands also expose “the errors that generative AI makes when trying to render hands.”[2] In order for a generative AI system to create images, images must first be “understood” through and as language. Specifically, generative AI creates images based on previous training data that must be labeled (that is, objects in training images must be identified using words) and AI images are produced in response to text-based prompts.

Botanical Computing as a whole, and Memories of Care in particular, draw inspiration from the theory of language developed by Walter Benjamin, among the most significant philosophers of modernity in the 20th century. While Benjamin’s influence on the field of new media arts is typically attributed to his canonical essay “The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility,” Ruzanka turns to his lesser-known On Language as Such, and on the Language of Man, drawing out a crucial moment in which he discusses language and breath. Benjamin understands the biblical passage “God breathes his breath into man” as uniting “life and mind and language.” This unification mirrors what Ruzanka seeks as “a botanical form of computation [namely] one that arises before logic, before naming.”[3] Even if human language circles in imitation of the divine creative word, human language, conveyed by breath, is nevertheless what humans (and, we might add, computers) must use to generate art. Plants are the companion species that provide the air humans breathe. They provide the material conditions of possibility for human and technological creative language—hence “botanical computing.”

From a new media arts curatorial perspective, this aspect of Botanical Computing illuminates another media theory in Benjamin that applies not to replicative or simulative media (as Benjamin’s media theory is usually understood), but rather to generative media, which is increasingly the media of today. Further, the main thrust of “The Work of Art” is that reproduction renders art too knowable, too available, at the expense of its aura. By turning to On Language Ruzanka’s work seems to a suggest a Benjaminian media theory of generation that re-infuses art with an element of the unknown. Thus, this exhibition offers an important contribution to scholarship on a canonical Jewish thinker. 

In the fourth dream, Growth Study, we witness what Ruzanka refers to as the “completed world”[4] of Botanical Computing. This world is rife with saturated contrasts—blood red skies invert the color of the lush computational green in the landscape—yet nevertheless in balance. The wide landscape cycles in and out of focus with sophisticated forms—sometimes vegetal, sometimes technological—fading in like established forests and new growth. Flickering like apparitions hovering above the scene, we catch glimpses of forms like potted chips and wires, or sprouting transistors, that harken to the timelapse of Plant Growth Dreams. Whereas in that dream, the hybrid cellular forms seemed to be growing in the isolation of a microscope slide, here we see them zoomed out, having found their “natural” habitat. The close aperture of the first dream opens into a full vista. Newly unbounded in the wide expanse of landscape, these forms appear less nascent and more juvenile: playful, toy-like, inventive. Their emergent potentiality dances on screen in an unmistakable figure ground relationship, while the background landscape slowly shifts, fading in and fading out, and lapsing into smooth red fields.

When Ruzanka writes that “The internet is an invasive species,”[5] she is decrying the monocultural overgrowth of technological determinism. In contrast, the vast variety of forms flickering through Growth Study show the speculative velocities we may yet reach. While the three temporal registers of human, technological, and botanical time are harmonious, Botanical Computing leaves open the question of interpretation. This exhibition presents a speculative world where the coded coexistence of the technological, the botanical, and the human mean that human interpretation is certain not to have the final word, and the world is richer for other inclusions.

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This exhibition is generously sponsored by the Sandra Kahn Wasserman Jewish Studies Center under the directorship of Dean Jessica Lang.

Silvia Ruzanka: Botanical Computing is curated by Katherine Behar, Professor in the Fine and Performing Arts Department in the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, Baruch College, CUNY and is produced by the New Media Artspace Student Docent Team. The exhibition is made possible by further support from the Baruch Computing and Technology Center (BCTC), the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, and the Newman Library. All images appear courtesy of the artist.

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Silvia Ruzanka is an artist-philosopher whose projects include virtual reality, interactive installation, video, and performance. Her work is concerned with the archaeology and memory of technology and media, and their intersections with everyday life. Her work has been presented at galleries, museums, and festivals internationally including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; SIGGRAPH; ISEA; the New Forms Festival (Vancouver); and the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture (Shenzhen, China), among others. She holds an MFA in Art and Technology Studies from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.A. in Physics from Smith College. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and is a Ph.D. candidate in Visual Arts: Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Art Theory at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts in Portland, Maine. Her current research is in the philosophy of computation and care.

Visit Ruzanka's website

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[1] Unpaginated, unpublished manuscript, 2^nd page of PDF.

[2] Correspondence with the author. February 16, 2024.

[3] Unpaginated, unpublished manuscript, 25^th page of PDF.

[4] Conversation with the author. February 5, 2024.

[5] Unpaginated, unpublished manuscript, 24^th page of PDF.