Miguel Chevalier and Jean-Pierre Balpe

Herbarius 2059 is new GVR* creation of artist Miguel Chevalier, in collaboration with author Jean-Pierre Balpe, exposed for the first time on the occasion of the Salon International du Livre Ancien 2009 with the Librairie Serge Plantureux in june 2009.

This project is the virtual incarnation of an herbal, whose long tradition dates back to ancient Greece.** Herbarius 2059 retains the form of the codex but mixes the real with the virtual, using projection to present texts and images that are generated in real time: growing fractal flowers and corresponding generative texts are projected side by side onto the twelve-leaved album. Each flower’s seed corresponds to a zodiac sign. Drawing his inspiration from the historical Herbarius, Miguel has created a new herbal composed of “Fractal Flowers”, virtual and autonomous seeds that germinate randomly, grow, bloom and die, creating a new seed that will evolve in turn. This vegetal world, peopled by mineral-like flowers, is intriguing also for its reminder of the geological world of crystals. Facing each flower is its imaginary description proposed by Jean-Pierre Balpe’s automatic writing generator drawing on scientific texts dating from the 14th century to modern times. Here, fiction is omnipresent; the resulting descriptive texts are infinitely renewed for each reader. The prototype of the Herbarius 2059 is a hymn to hybridization and for us opens a door to timeless imagination.

Its roots link the Herbarius 2059 to tradition, but the technology that it uses reveals its nature as being radically modern. Herbarius 2059 points us towards what could be a twenty-first century bibliophily.

* Generative Virtual Reality. The program used by Miguel Chevalier was developed by Cyrille Henry.
** The Herbarius is an illustrated herbal of Greek origin, inspired by the 1st century A.D. medical text De materia medica by Dioscorides and composed in Latin in the 4th century by an author known as pseudo-Apuleius Platonicus. This herbal explains the curative properties and virtues of 131 plants and how to use them. It was widely circulated in Europe and the Near East, where it was translated, copied and recopied by generations of scribes until 1481 when the first printed version was introduced.


Production of Herbarius 2059 :
Librairie Serge Plantureux
and Librairie de Sèvres (Bernard Esposito)

Download the catalogue "Herbarius - 12 graines" published at the occasion of the Salon International du Livre Ancien - Grand Palais, Paris, 2009