In 2016, my friend Camila Bolatti led the artistic project La Naturaleza de las Cosas, which means, “The nature of things”. She took one photo per day of an uprooted plant, documenting its process of death and desiccation, and invited several people to make different works of art starting from these photos. At the end, there was an exhibition of all the works, a collective meditation on impermanence. It opened 2016-11-05. There were many very creative contributions by many people. This page documents, and partly contains, my contribution.
I combined the nine photos in a laser-cutting pattern and cut it in 1.5-millimeter-thick MDF. I hung it (with UHMWPE fishing line, much stronger than necessary) in a frame made with pieces of MDF, and accompanied it with several printed copies of the full source code and the following explanation, written in ventilated prose, also printed.
The pieces of the frame are 3-millimeter-thick MDF, laser-cut in an open hardware construction set called Jecvals, another project of mine. Both the frame and the panel were cut by Max58 here in the city of Buenos Aires. I recommend them. They struggled mightily with the design of the panel, which caught fire several times due to having parallel lines too close together.
Here you can see the only photo, of fairly lousy quality, that I took on the night of the opening. Appropriately, before I returned a couple of nights later with a friend’s camera to take better photos, the frame and also the panel had been partly broken; someone tried to fix them with masking tape.
Here are the other photos I took that day:
I license my contributions to this project under the “Creative Commons Attribution–Share Alike 4.0 Unported” license, which allows you to copy them and use them basically however you like, as long as you acknowledge me as the author of these contributions, and you don’t try to impose further restrictions on your derived work. But the original photos of the flowers (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9) are works by Camila Bolatti, and although she did say I could redistribute them, she hasn’t yet formally licensed them under a Creative Commons license. If I manage to clarify the situation with a formal license, I’ll update this page, but until then, there’s always the risk that she or one of her heirs will withdraw the license to redistribute these images. So I recommend that you save a copy of this page and the files in case if its obligatory disappearance from the Web.
In addition to simply copying this page with wget -r -np http://canonical.org/~kragen/naturaleza/, you can clone the Git repository with all the source code and the whole editing history with git clone http://canonical.org/~kragen/naturaleza/.git. This includes the Python programs I used to generate the file to send to Max58.
Ⓒ 2016, 2018, Kragen Javier Sitaker
