BLOOMCORE

“In Silva’s BLOOMCORE, we encounter beings familiar, yet unknown, and unknowable. Lush rhododendrons, broad-leaved ferns, rare roses, denizens of deep forests: scanned in the spring of 2022, they are each presented in full bloom, at the height of their lives and thus also on the brink of death. As I write these words, most of the real-life plants Silva has volumetrically captured are almost certainly dead, but they’ll remain preserved in perpetuity, on the blockchain, like museum specimens. To me this is profoundly gothic — these blooms hanging outside of time in the radiant computational darkness, promising transcendence, concealing poison (Silva has even included a few poisonous pitcher plants in this collection, vegetal carnivores with alluring, vaselike forms). In this he summons the vast dreaming life of plants, their hidden, distributed way of knowing, their collective ancientness, and the slow, halting way they move across the world.” — Claire L Evans