L-systems flowers 1

This series of five delicate and ghostly images are ‘prints’ in e-ink on screens familiar from devices such as Kindle. To produce these Barrat set an animation he had produced running on a device and then ripped out the connecting cables from his computer to the e-screen, capturing the image in a frozen moment. 

This aesthetic of flowers and foliage and the process of a single ‘exposure’ evokes the early cyanotype camera-less photographic experiments of the mid 19th century by Sir John Herschel and Anna Atkins. However, rather than a single physical object being exposed to light and its form recorded, Barrat chooses to freeze a frame from an animation of his own 3d digital model of a flower, which he created using code he calls L-systems. 

He used a neural network trained on both a dataset of low quality gardening software screenshots and a dataset he curated of his favourite colour field paintings. This desire to evoke the hand-painted comes from Barrat’s interest in expressions of love which he associates with human touch, and which the symbol of the flower is indelibly entwined. However, Barrat decided the resulting e-ink images should include the pixelation and ‘dithering’ so as not to deny their generative and digital nature.