Digital Seedling, 2025

Melted and 3D Printed Metal, wood

20 x 20 x 2.5 cm

Unique

Digital Seedling is a small, wall-based sculpture created from melted and 3D-printed metal. At its centre, an intricate, abstracted plant form unfolds, surrounded by delicate engravings across the surface that hint at the complex life cycles of various plant and seed species. The sculpture draws on language and human knowledge extracted from scientific literature, referencing the ways in which botanical information has been gathered, categorized, and preserved as a means of ensuring future survival.

The work brings together two opposing forces: the organic processes of growth, decay, and renewal, and the cold, standardized methods of machine-based fabrication. While the plant form suggests the fragile beginnings of life — the potential held within a single seed — the material reality of the piece undermines that fragility. The 3D-printed metal, a material neither nurturing nor fertile, emphasizes a dissonance between natural life and technological preservation.

The engravings, mechanically etched into the surface, further distance the work from the tactility of human touch. They hint at an archive of biological memory, translated through the detached and perfectible processes of machines. In Digital Seedling, nature is not cultivated but simulated, its forms mediated by systems of control, optimization, and replication.

By combining visual languages of organic life and industrial production, Digital Seedling invites reflection on the ways technology attempts to conserve, imitate, and ultimately reshape the natural world. It questions whether something essential is lost in the translation of life into data, or if new forms of existence can emerge from this synthesis. The work sits at the threshold where preservation, transformation, and alienation collide — a reminder of both the possibilities and limitations inherent in our technological aspirations toward nature.