Die Sprache im Blick, 2023

Laser-engraved natural fibre

28 x 54 x 4 cm

Unique

Made during a residency in Bavaria, this work focuses on a fragment of tree bark, captured using high-resolution 3D scanning. Cropped to a microscopic scale, the scanned surface reveals an unexpected overlap between organic patterns and forms that resemble early human inscriptions — simple marks, glyphs, or even the first steps toward storytelling. What begins as a close observation of natural material slowly shifts into something that looks constructed, as if nature itself had started to write.

This observation ties into a broader thread running through the artist’s practice: the relationship between human gesture and machine process. Although the work deals with natural material, the hand of the artist is almost completely absent. Instead, it is a digital tool that interprets, records, and magnifies the surface, introducing a different kind of authorship — one mediated through technology.

In a parallel work, Zufällige Formen (DALL E 2), the artist prompted an AI model to generate “truly random” shapes — a task that, despite its apparent simplicity, highlights the difficulty machines have in breaking free from structure and prediction. Shown together, the two works create a quiet dialogue about how forms emerge: whether they are grown, written, or computed.

Rather than setting nature and technology against each other, the work suggests they are intertwined. The surfaces of bark and the outputs of algorithms both carry traces of systems larger than themselves — shaped by chance, memory, error, and the frameworks we use to understand the world.