Unseen Flora .morphos IV is a shape-shifting audiovisual installation and the latest addition to the series of Unseen Flora. This piece reimagines the synthetic botanical illustrations created by the four fictional botanists—Charlotte Bancroft, Beatrice Hastings, Edmund Thorne, and Theodore Winslow—through a continuous flow of transformation and morphing. In its style and aesthetic, it reminds of the distinctive look and dynamism of Artificial Botany .morphos.

Once again, it is an easily adaptable installation, allowing it to be modified and customised for various exhibition contexts and setups.

Unseen Flora .morphos IV builds upon the foundation of the series, which features synthetic botanical illustrations created by fictional yet entirely plausible botanists. In this iteration, these speculative visions find their place on the digital canvas, where they continuously morph between various forms and shapes. In this case, the ever-shifting tendency of nature, which evolves and remains in a continuous flux of change, finds its application to fictional flora that only appears unreal due to its unfamiliar shapes.

The work comprises four distinct yet complementary audiovisual pieces, each highlighting the botanical subjects attributed to a different botanist. The production involved the creation of a new pipeline which had at its basis some animations previously created with a styleGAN model. The model was controlled using a specialised network designed to extract information from a single image and link it to Stable Diffusion, which then generates the subsequent image based on the collected data. The StyleGAN animations produce a continuous interpolation between images, while Stable Diffusion adds new elements and features with each iteration.