Maria Kuptsova

In the modern technological landscape, we have unprecedented access to complex knowledge stored within biological systems. Thanks to technological progress, we can interpret electrical impulses permeating plant tissues, measure the electroactivity of fungi, track bird behavior, and analyze the metabolic processes of forests. Access to this rich volume of data holds tremendous potential for developing design systems that integrate biological ideas into the creative process, thereby allowing biological agencies to become co-developers or co-realizers.

In my artistic and teaching practice, I explore this interaction through a series of bio-digital drawings, using techniques such as 3D scanning, LiDAR scanning, algorithmic drawing, and bio-programming to convey information from biological systems to digital ones.

The aim of these bio-digital drawings is to establish a protocol for our interaction with the environment. By memorizing information contained within biological systems and embodying it in catalogs of detailed mathematical drawings, this method creates inter-object connections between different layers and ensembles, connecting time and space. Each line in these drawings symbolizes a simulation, describing bacterial, ecological, and informational exchanges, thereby revealing the anthropogenic dimension of the landscape.

From the microscopic world of biological particles to the digital world of point clouds and back to tangible physical substance, series of bio-digital drawings smoothly blur the boundaries between organic and synthetic. For example, using LiDAR scanning, the works evaluate the carbon potential of living trees, emphasizing their important role in capturing carbon dioxide and mitigating climate change. By quantitatively assessing tree biomass and roughly determining the carbon stored in their structures, these drawings reveal the complex nuances of forests' ability to capture carbon in diverse forest ecosystems.

Bio-Computational Scapes is a discourse on the possibility of a symbiotic relationship between humans, technologies, and the natural world, unfolding through bio-digital canvases. Aesthetics become an integral ecological property, shaping a new type of metacommunication (Pasquero 2021), a "metalanguage" (Bateson 1977), or "metacommunication" (Delanda 2011) between humans, technologies, and the environment.

Author: Maria Kuptsova