Useful plants
Useful plants
Multi-channel video installation, 5.1channel sound, 2024
Archives, as the predecessors of datasets, also serve as their raw material. During early Japanese colonial rule, the “Useful Plants Survey” aimed to catalog Taiwan’s natural resources. This initiative led to the establishment of botanical gardens and the introduction of tropical species, inadvertently altering Taiwan’s environment. Under the banner of “usefulness,” colonial archives categorized nature and defined ecological functions. These logics persist today, hidden within AI prompt engineering.
This work gathers stories from plant surveys and afforestation proposals, collaborating with musicians to compose traditional tunes that were never sung in these forests. Using AI to generate fictional historical landscapes, the piece revisits how ecological narratives, once tools of development, grew forests that exist only within archival datasets.