Silva Ex Machina

Alfredo Salazar-Caro’s “Silva Ex Machina” is an animation centering on a scan of a sculpture of Xōchipilli, a Machika deity whose name translates into “flower prince” in the Nahuatl language. Xōchipilli is associated with flowers, hallucinogenic plants, medicinal herbs, music, and dance. Both the statue and its base are covered in carvings of morning glory and other flowers, as well as sacred and psychoactive organisms such as mushrooms, suggesting transformation and the transmuting of energy. Created with generative geometries and AI, Salazar-Caro’s animation shows blossoms and plants sprouting from the rotating statue, extending the abstracted engravings into a luscious, naturalistic representation. The sculpture from which the scan has been created is housed in Mexico City, its place of origin, in the National Museum of Anthropology. The proceeds from the NFT sales will go to Eden Reforestation Projects, devoted to restoring regional forests in the Amazon with the help of local communities. Together, the collectors of the edition could potentially support the planting of a small forest. “Silvia Ex Machina” transplants Xōchipilli’s statue into a distributed virtual simulation, invoking its medicinal powers through the process of reforestation.