Pigment print on Carson museum paper,
handmade steel frame (hand engraved)
90 x 60 cm
Edition of 3 + 2 AP
Pigment print on Carson museum paper,
handmade steel frame (hand engraved)
60 x 90 cm
Edition of 3 + 2 AP
Pigment print on Carson museum paper,
handmade steel frame (hand engraved)
60 x 40 cm
Edition of 5 + 2 AP
Pigment print on Carson museum paper,
handmade steel frame (hand engraved)
60 x 40 cm
Edition of 5 + 2 AP
Pigment print on Carson museum paper,
handmade steel frame (hand engraved)
73 x 110 cm
Edition of 3 + 2 AP
Pigment print on Carson museum paper,
handmade steel frame (hand engraved)
90 x 60 cm
Edition of 3 + 2 AP
THRESHOLDS OF ENGINEERED LIFE
2025, Fine art print on paper, hand-engraved steel frames, various dimensions, sound work with visual interface
Funded by Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation
Photo Credits: Robert Schittko
Inside tropical greenhouses, the lush foliage often distracts from the hidden systems that make this artificial survival possible. My focus is the pipes that sneak beneath the soil, the hissing misters and the blinking sensors — technical infrastructures that reveal the control sustaining species far from their original habitats.
Many of these plants were transported during colonial expeditions and are now preserved under glass. The greenhouse becomes a metaphor for ongoing extraction, orchestrating survival and performing nature as spectacle.
To capture these spaces, I use tools that measure by collecting thousands of points across surfaces. Historically, such methods have claimed territory, extracted resources, and enforced dominance. Today, they remain part of surveillance and extractive digital economies.
I use them to expose mechanisms of control through Gaussian splatting, which turns each measured point into a soft, semi-transparent fragment. Each fragment becomes a refusal to participate in extractive seeing, breaking the illusion of objective capture. In the virtual world, preserved plants overgrow their infrastructure and turn the inside outwards.
Framed in hand-engraved steel, these images come to life through poetic fragments describing a sonic transformation. The sound of this reality emerges from field recordings of mechanized greenhouse environments and sonification of the scanned data. As point clouds accumulate and plants virtually overgrow their containment, mechanical orchestrations transform: synthetic frequencies bloom from coordinate data, algorithmic rhythms dissolve into organic textures.
A sound interface employs e-ink technology – a deliberately slow, energy-minimal display that resists the smooth consumption of digital imagery. When sonic elements trigger visual responses, the screen's inherent refresh delays and ghosting artifacts become poetic metaphors for technological irritation. Mechanical infrastructure appears in static portraits before dissolving into fractured traces, creating temporal overlays where past and present contaminate each other.The technology's 'failure' to deliver smooth experience parallels the greenhouse's fundamental deception: both promise perfect replication while revealing the seams of their constructed realities.