Karen Aune
Title: Lapsus Trópicus
Gallery: Hoffmann House

Lapsus Trópicus is an installation derived from the artisit´s research project, creative practice and doctoral thesis entitled "Techno-aesthetic spaces of fiction". The work seeks to generate a poetic speculation on the relationship between human beings, technology and nature based on the fictitious hypothesis about what would happen if a glitch - a computer error - began to transform a specific ecosystem. In this context, the creative process of the work dialogues from art with design, architecture, science fiction cinema and technoscience, to generate a reflection on the consequences of the Anthropocene era, by pointing out and questioning, through fiction, aspects about the future.

Lapsus Trópicus materializes as a digital botanical garden, a nature transformed by technology; an artificial world, sensorially virtual, where the idea of ​​the fractal is prevalent; a fragmented, symbiotic, organic and invasive space that is proportional to the viewer's immersion and at the same time provides the feeling of being an explorer in a world to come, altered by a glitch, generated from its own means of production in which each botanical element is cloned and digitally mutated over and over again into another more complex element. The forest pretends to be the Matrix between the virtual world and its simulacrum: the biological, real world.

The sculptural works that make up the body of the installation were created from digital variations of subtropical species. These species are transformed into each other in a generative way, translated into triplex wood combined with fluorescent yellow acrylic and cut in numerical control machine tools. In this way, the main work is perceived as a kind of mutated plant organism, similar to the backbone of a strange being that moves through space, in constant movement, in an accelerated transformation of its DNA. Then, the secondary work behaves as the continuation of the main; a vertical variation of its matrix, which seems to bury itself in the ground only to ascend in search of light.

The sculptural organicity of the installation allows it to have different dimensions through the alteration of the curve of its axes. Natural light, during the day, combined with artificial light at night, favors the perception of fluorescent acrylic, which, having its own light, creates the feeling of being able to observe the photosynthesis or bioluminescent processes of this artificial plant, which seems to transform in real time but in another dimension.

It is possible to give a distorted continuity to the installation and create the illusion of its expansion and defragmentation towards other dimensions, through organically cut acrylic mirrors, installed on the walls or on the floor below the pieces, poetically giving it the mutating duality of its doppelgänger and its symmetrical continuity in virtual space. In addition, the installation can have a sound atmosphere, a kind of echo of the DNA of the plants. It was created from recordings made inside a flower at changing light, when the diurnal fauna begins to give way to the nocturnal and all sound is transformed. The recording was modified based on the genetic code of the Light Harvesting Complex (light processing antennas of the Monocotyledons), a botanical class that is part of the base of the sculptural work, thus following the same logic of numerical parameters of the entire project.

*This project was carried out through the Support Fund for Research Assistant Professors of the School of Architecture and Design at Universidad de los Andes, and has a book published by Ediciones Uniandes in 2020 entitled: Espacios tecnoestéticos de Ficción, which is an edited version of the thesis carried out by the artist Karen Aune for her doctoral program in Advanced Studies in Artistic Productions at Universidad de Barcelona. The book´s prologue was written by Julia Buenaventura and includes essays by Andrés García La Rota, Santiago Rueda and César Peña.