Orchids | Machine cultivars - Volume Ø
Project funded by the 2025 Leonardo.ai Imagination Fund
To cultivate an orchid is to intervene. It all started here.
Orchids examines cultivation as it migrates from the botanical into the technological domain, positioning machine learning as a continuum site of cultivation.
Engaging the open image photographic archive of wild Australian orchid specimens held in the NSW Herbarium, a custom dataset was curated to train a LoRA model, with the idea to engage machine learning as a digital ecology”cultivating” orchid morphologies.
The model’s digital outputs are vectorized and inscribed by machines onto brass plates. Each plate functions as a die for blind embossing onto paper, a printmaking process that embosses without ink.
The raised reliefs appear as traces of forms that never existed, registering the presence of absence.
Together, the sculptural brass dies and works on paper are preserved as tactile, fossilized records of the model’s cultivated orchids, mirroring the ontologies of preservation found in the original herbarium dataset.
Drawing on technologist Yuk Hui’s Recursivity and Contingency, the project rejects the separation of nature and machine, treating technological systems as continuations of organic becoming - recursive systems in which “a looping movement of returning to itself in order to determine itself.” Similarly, we witness the model looping back on its own archive to explore emergent morphologies that arise, adapt, and hybridize in the long continuum of cultivation.
Drawing on new materialist and cybernetic ideas, the work treats machine learning as a site for digital ecology, where dynamic entanglement recursively entwines with natural systems.
OFFICIAL LEOARDO.AI PROJECT VIDEO
Orchids has been shortlisted as a finalist for the 2026 Digital Art Awards, curated by HOFA and presented in partnership with Phillips and Hivemind Capital at Phillips Asia HQ in Hong Kong on the occassion of Hong Kong Art Week. Sales enquiry’s to be made here