The final chapter of Once Upon A Garden, titled Synthetic Rot, is the culmination of this body of work spanning nearly four years. It traces generative AI models’ evolution over this period and their ability to help us speculate on and synthesise the past.

This chapter presents 50 stills and 50 videos of randomly assorted flowers, often with multiple different species sharing the same stem, behaving erratically, making and remaking themselves with only chaos as a compass. Each video is accompanied with the reference still image that was used as a keyframe to create the video.

Flowers from the previous chapter are made even less organic through an Image-to-Image pipeline. The outputs are then used as keyframes to create animations using Runway’s Gen 3 Alpha. The soundtrack for the videos is created by mixing three types of recorded sounds (nature, machinery, people at work) with desert blues musical tracks generated in Suno AI.

Synthetic Rot is the wildest stage of this body of work, where flowers are composed of mostly inorganic material, exposing the fact that they are primordially data mediated through our screens by code made possible by machinery built with natural resources.