Adam Chodzko
Adam Chodzko is an artist working across media, exploring our conscious and unconscious behaviour, social relations and collective imaginations through artworks that are propositions for aberrant forms of ‘social media’.
This new digital commission has been developed specially for The Botanical Mind. Working with computer coders, Black Shuck, Chodzko has developed an algorithm that searches for ciphers - signs and letters created for a secret language, the Lingua Ignotae, by the 12th Century Christian mystic Hildegard von Bingen. The algorithm scans footage of undergrowth, woodland and forest, looking for the ciphers in the shadows between and under the vegetation. Chodzko has assigned each character a sound, taken from the opening phrases of Hildegard’s choral compostions: O Viridissima Virga (O branch of freshest green) and O Frondens Virga (O blooming branch, you stand upright in your nobility, as breaks the dawn on high). Once located, the ciphers are sequenced to spell out names of plants she catalogued in her writing as well as deviating to create new hybrid plants.
Chodzko has speculated that this secret language – a code she developed some 900 years ago – might be received as a message to us now, or as a plan for the future. The work attempts to recover, mobilise and enact it as an ecstatic experience, generated through a system of channelling – of light, darkness, language, naming, plants and nature – a possible path toward an infinite Eden.
This is a clip from the work which plays out infinitely, in real time, and attempts to become an idea of botanical transformation – at once both a process and its experience.
