Megaflora Mythologies

About

Mission Statement

Today as we face geopolitical instability, climate catastrophe, and population decline, choosing to believe in and conserve our planet for the future is an act of faith. While religious institutions decry a decline in younger supplicants, our generation increasingly seeks spirituality in Nature. Our project taps into this inherent wellspring of awe in humanity by recontextualizing this connection between Man and Nature, Art and Science, Life and Death through the apotheosis of the corpse flower. By nurturing audience-sourced narratives around this plant portal, we create modern mythologies for collective healing and storytelling, too often reserved for prophets of the past.

Close-up floral texture in deep red tones

Botanical greenhouse atmosphere with layered foliage

Research and Process

Our main public offering will be the immersive installation of the corpse flower monument for visitors to experience, complete with music and scent. Our poet will read a ceremonial “prayer” for attending pilgrims, and we’ll gather audience stories, impressions, and reactions on-site. We’re also interested in hosting photogrammetry/3D capture demos and citizen science workshops. We’ll share our scans, code/data processes online as open source resources for the public to play with (a virtual herbarium) and ideally place the 3D model in video games/pop culture for conservation awareness, and share documentary videos of our project on social media.

Collaboration

By leveraging the cult following of the mysterious, alien, charismatic corpse flower, we aim to start a conversation between botanists, technologists, artists, and laymen on conservation and its reliance on public interest and visibility. We question this oddly capitalistic attitude towards our natural world, where living things must prove their value in ways such as utility, beauty, and ecological impact in order to “deserve” funding, study, and preservation. By fossilizing ephemerality into eternity and transforming data into performance, we test technology’s ability to facilitate and frame narratives and epistemological relationships, and elevate these conversations into public consciousness and popular culture.

Dramatic flower bloom against a dark background

Artists Involved

Dyan Jong

Lead Artist

Brad Davis

Technical Artist

Andrew Thomas Huang

Writer/Poet

Sarah Sitkin

Sculptor

Lucy Yao

Composer

Titan Arum

The plant

With less than 1000 individuals left in the wild, you’re more likely to see this megaflora in San Marino than in its native Sumatran habitat, an alarming reality. Brandon Tam, The Huntington’s orchid curator, described the Titan Arum as botany’s answer to zoology’s panda as an icon of conservation. Conservation funding depends on public interest, and we hope to leverage the Titan’s star power to develop a case study of data capture, artistic reimagination, and public engagement to benefit more plants.

Research & media

We’re passionate about the corpse flower because it intersects conservation, botany, ecology, life, death, and religion. We’re interested in exploring these relationships and tapping into the faith at the core of conservation, faith in life after ourselves, and our communal dedication to preserving this world for future generations.

The Blooming Process

Each summer, The Huntington welcomes 12,000 visitors to witness the corpse flower. People take time off work, dropping everything to make the pilgrimage, just to get a whiff of eau de rotting meat. The towering inflorescence of Amorphophallus titanum, aka Titan arum, is open and reproductively viable for 36 hours, a portal to life and future generations, before dying.