Thresholds of Engineered Life

Inside tropical greenhouses, lush foliage distracts from the hidden systems that make this artificial survival possible. My focus is the pipes that sneak beneath the soil, the hissing misters and the blinking sensors: technical infrastructures that reveal the control sustaining species far from their original habitats. Many plants were transported during colonial expeditions and preserved under glass. The greenhouse becomes a metaphor for ongoing extraction, orchestrating survival and performing nature as spectacle. To capture these spaces, I use LIDAR that measures by collecting thousands of points across surfaces. Historically, such methods have claimed territory, extracted resources, and enforced dominance. Today, they remain part of surveillance and extractive digital economies. I use them to expose mechanisms of control through Gaussian splatting, which turns each measured point into a soft, semi-transparent fragment. Each fragment becomes a refusal to participate in extractive seeing, breaking the illusion of objective capture. In the virtual world, preserved plants overgrow their infrastructure and turn the inside outwards. Framed in hand-engraved steel, these images come to life through poetic fragments describing a sonic transformation. The sound of this reality emerges from field recordings of mechanized greenhouse environments and sonification of the scanned data. As point clouds accumulate and plants virtually overgrow their containment, mechanical orchestrations transform: synthetic frequencies bloom from coordinate data, algorithmic rhythms dissolve into organic textures. A sound interface employs e-ink technology. A deliberately slow, energy-minimal display that resists the smooth consumption of digital imagery. When sonic elements trigger visual responses, the screen's inherent refresh delays and ghosting artifacts become poetic metaphors for technological irritation. Mechanical infrastructure appears in static portraits before dissolving into fractured traces, creating temporal overlays where past and present contaminate each other. The technology's 'failure' to deliver smooth experience parallels the greenhouse's deception: both promise perfect replication while revealing the seams of their constructed realities.