Mia Forrest uses technology to reflect nature’s algorithms
Artists, Case Studies | Published on | Last updated on
2 min
Meet the artist
For Orchids, Mia uploaded images from the National Herbarium of New South Wales into an AI model to generate new species of AI-grown orchids
Mia Forrest is an Australian multidisciplinary artist with work presented by Sotheby’s and Unit London. She works from her studio in Byron Bay near the rainforest and likes to stay close to nature as she creates. She sees nature as a living, breathing complex system, and through her art she explores how its patterns mirror those found in technology.
“I’m fascinated by the natural world and all the algorithms that exist beneath the surface.”
Mia has always been curious about orchids and the way horticulturists cultivate them. She studied how orchid species are brought to life and began experimenting with ways to replicate this process in a digital environment. It was through this experimentation that her Imagination Fund project, Orchids, took shape.
“The more I learned about orchids, the more I realized how much of their history is shaped by human hands.”
Using open-source images of wild native orchids from the Australasian Virtual Herbarium, Mia curated a custom dataset to train a bespoke AI model, with the idea to engage machine learning as a digital ecology “cultivating” orchid morphologies. Mia then had these machine-engraved onto brass plates and finally pressed into paper as blind embossed works.
“Once the images were generated, I wanted to take them out of the digital space and turn them into something physical that people could actually experience.”
Inside the creative process
Translating the generated images into physical objects was costly and labor-intensive. It required specialist fabrication, purchasing a significant amount of material, and close collaboration with skilled technicians. But in the end, Mia was able to transform an orchid cultivated in a digital ecosystem into something you can see and feel in real life.
“It’s a registration of the presence of absence — these flowers never existed, yet they leave a physical trace.”
Pushing their craft forward
Orchids encourages viewers to think differently about the relationship between nature and technology. Its unique use of AI shows how image models are shaping creativity beyond the screen and informing work that exists in the physical world.
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