Suporn Shoosongdej
Abstract :
Algorithm Blooming emerges from a synthesis between artistic research and personal reflection on impermanence, loss, and digital rebirth. As a video artist and visual anthropologist, I approach the digital image as both an aesthetic and anthropological trace, a site where life, death, and memory converge. The death of my father nineteen months ago profoundly reshaped my understanding of decay and regeneration, becoming an emotional and conceptual foundation for this work.
The project employs AI to regenerate an image of a wilted amaryllis into full bloom, allowing it to decay again in an infinite video loop. This cyclical rhythm becomes a metaphor for mourning and renewal—a meditation on how technology reanimates fragments of life and how digital systems can hold traces of tenderness once rooted in the body. Grounded in Bauman’s Liquid Modernity (2000) and Braidotti’s Posthuman Aesthetics (2013), the work explores how synthetic processes reshape our perception of beauty, temporality, and human vulnerability.
By merging the algorithmic and the organic, Algorithm Blooming reflects on the continuity between data and memory, life and simulation. The digital bloom thus becomes an act of remembrance, an aesthetic gesture that invites us to see transience not as an end, but as a fluid synthesis of becoming.
Objectives :
The objective of this research-based artwork is to examine how digital technology and posthuman aesthetics can synthesize organic processes, memory, and temporal experiences to generate new forms of meaning. The work questions the ontology of beauty and emotion in the age of algorithmic reproduction and reflects on the potential of AI to mediate between human affect and technological regeneration.
Conceptual Framework :
Grounded in Bauman’s (2000) Liquid Modernity and Braidotti’s (2013) Posthuman Aesthetics, the project situates itself within a landscape of fluid boundaries where identity, authorship, and authenticity dissolve. The regeneration of a decayed flower through AI parallels the anthropological reflection on loss and rebirth, where technology becomes a surrogate vessel for memory. By allowing the machine to perform the act of blooming, the artist redefines creation as a dialogic process between emotional experience and algorithmic agency.
Process / Methodology :
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Techniques and Materials :
Medium: AI-generated imagery and time-lapse video.
Materials:
– Found online image (wilted amaryllis from digital commons)
– AI-generated visual sequences showing progressive stages of bloom
Technique:
The creative process combines image regeneration through machine learning, compositional sequencing, temporal looping, and careful color grading to maintain visual continuity across the artificial life cycle. The work employs what can be termed “algorithmic resurrection”—using computational processes to reverse natural decay and create synthetic vitality.
This process blends organic forms and algorithmic logic to create a meditative visual rhythm that expresses both natural transformation and synthetic manipulation. The resulting aesthetic experience exists at the intersection of biological observation and computational generation, where viewers cannot easily distinguish between photographic capture and artificial construction.
Result / Conclusion :
The resulting video work embodies an infinite cycle of transformation—where life, decay, and renewal coexist in digital continuity. It reveals beauty not as permanence but as an ever-shifting synthesis between emotion, data, and time. Algorithm Blooming proposes that digital aesthetics can serve as a new language for mourning, remembrance, and transformation—where even loss may find form within the fluidity of algorithmic life.
References :
Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid Modernity. Polity Press.
Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Polity Press.
Hayles, N. K. (1999). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press.
Pink, S. (2021). Doing Visual Ethnography (4th ed.). SAGE Publications.
Shanken, E. A. (2015). Systems Aesthetics and the Digital Condition. In M. Lovejoy, C. Paul, & V. Vesna (Eds.), Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts. Intellect Books.