Interactive virtual reality installation projected on the facade of public church St Joseph, at Enghien-les-Bains
Software Cyrille Henry
Installation visible from sundown until 11th January 2009

A rain of stamens in the night

Leaning against the old walls of the church of ’Enghien-les-Bains, gigantic plants proliferate at the surface of the stone, uncoil their scape around the stained glass windows, open their buds towards the sky. These flowers of light, of all colors and all shapes, convened the most powerful computers for their germination, bend themselves to look at us as the sunflowers follow the sun, rustle our steps on the square. We are the breeze that bends them and make them bloom in monumental corolla, to beat some pistils before disappearing slowly in an explosion of stamens. The flowers of Miguel Chevalier, fruits of the algorithms, are born, grow and die the time of a cycle of artificial growth. Of the valerian or the uluer, are these flowers of high stems who have taken assault the facade of the church? These are fractals flowers answers the artist who possesses in his numeric herbarium an unlimited number of seeds.

The first plants, which Miguel Chevalier made germinate on nearly every continent (in the city’ places, in the passageways of the subway as well as on the walls) are called Sur-Natures or Ultra-Natures or Autres Natures. Slender were their stems, translucent their petals. Recognizable also by their botanical affiliation. Trough the time, these simulacra of nature passed from filarial structure to a fractal order. By continuous interlocking of only a single geometric volume, they picked a primitive nature that makes them look today like solar whirlwinds, of the tails of comets or fireworks. The new "flowers" of Miguel Chevalier came out of the plant (and of the botanical orderings) to embrace the cosmic. And this mutant nature, that tremendously changed scale, remain always molt by our look and our movements. Fascinating paradox that this new sensorial experience that consists in lightly touching - and to make move of the tip of the fingers - the constellations to dress the mineral of a numeric breeze.

Annik Hémery