Florafutura

Breaking the classical boundaries of nature and digital, playful, educational, awareness, encouraging, evoking, strong emotional feelings, open and alluring, closed and protective, colorful boundaries – between space and nature, breaking down boundaries between virtual and reality, a controlled wilderness, of flows, rhythms, and processes, a world of infinite, biological pathways.

How will the relationship between human and nature develope in the age of mixed reality and automatisation? How will we perceive nature in the digital age? Will it change our human habits and connection to nature?

In the time of climate change and biodiversity crisis we need to remind ourselves to our position in the natural world. With the dawn of the digital age and automatisation we need a new construct(definition) of nature, by including technology to its term.

FloraFutura creates a space for changing one’s perspective towards nature. A space that turns the human from the anthropocentric to an ecocentric worldview and encourages individuals to preserve and respect nature, where nature, technology, and the individual are merging and interacting together. FloraFutura aims to create space for encouraging natural developments and raising the urgent needs of environmental awareness. A physical manifestation of ecocentric values, needs, and aspirations.

This space should gather the Humboldts of today and tomorrow – whose activities contribute to the fields of ecology, global change, fight against established social rules and conventions. The ‘Greta generation’ urges nature as it was, they demonstrate, argue and fight for the climate. They live from the idea of an idealized construct of nature – they are the “new romantics”. As they will be the next generation of environmental scientists, engineers, NGO’s leaders, environmental lawyers, ecotourists and local farmers and gardeners, we can assume that they will shape the future of how we will perceive nature and our environment.

The botanical garden should develop from just preserving the plant biodiversity to creating a conversation between nature, technology, and human. Hydroponics and robotics maintain the flora by taking care of characteristics as water supply, ph-levels, light and nutritional provision, coded and controlled by measuring systems. The spectators‘ multisensory perception is stimulated by visual, acoustic, olfactory and mechanic characteristics and is in direct biotic interaction with the plants through the exchange of oxygen and CO². The plants by themselves communicate with each other through chemical, hormonal signals, carbons, nitrogen, phosphorus, and water.

Florafutura is a biotech-park, an automated garden, a data and seed market, a collection of artefacts of the nature, a museological space for nature, a space for celebration the relation between human and the environment.