Price Per Stem is a project that explores the pricing of cut flowers - and the associated social, industrial, economic and environmental factors that sit behind them - through the peony, a flower that requires precise conditions in which to grow and only blooms for six weeks of the year. Each flower in the series, generated using multiple bespoke machine learning models, has a price given to it based on data and events that influence the price of flowers, from the weather to holidays like Valentine’s and Mother’s Day, fluctuating across the year. Each in the series contains a paired physical and digital element. The physical element entails 56 photographs of real peonies, taken by the artist in her studio. These photographs form the basis of the corresponding digital element – a single imagined peony in video form, generated using machine learning and accompanied by a price. At various points a hand drawn version of the digital is overlayed, reconnecting the imagined peonies to the physical world.
