(K)Limax
2024
(K)Limax employs AI to generate still lifes in the tradition of ikebana, yet systematically destabilizes the expected harmony of this aesthetic canon. By introducing smartphones, slugs, insects, and broken eggs into the arrangements, the images enact a form of techno-organic hybridity: an unsettling convergence of digital apparatus, non-human life, and cultural ritual.
In this sense, the work can be read as a post-digital allegory. The ikebana reference—historically bound to ideas of balance, transience, and spiritual attention—collides with motifs of consumption, intrusion, and decay. The smartphone, a tool of permanent connectivity and surveillance, enters the tableau as both fetish and contaminant; the slug and insect, often considered abject, destabilize the ornamental order by foregrounding material vulnerability and entropy. The broken egg, long a symbol of fertility, fragility, and potential, introduces a further dimension of rupture: it marks both the possibility of renewal and the inevitability of loss.
These compositions articulate the condition of a present in which nature and technology no longer form distinct categories but oscillate within a shared ecology of images, affects, and dependencies. The still lifes are not only meditations on beauty but also speculative sites where the boundaries of the organic and the artificial are continuously negotiated.