Unseen Flora is a series of works that offers a novel perspective on the world of botanical illustrations. Through a surreal representation of the natural kingdom, the work focuses on the visionary practice of four British scientists and artists: Charlotte Bancroft, Beatrice Hastings, Edmund Thorne and Theodore Winslow.

The series, with a strong conceptual focus, has as its core the exploration of the idea of post-truth, contextualised in the contemporary digital age where the boundaries between real and virtual, natural and artificial, seem to become more and more blurred. Especially after the sudden influx of innovative technologies led by AI language models and image generation systems, the notion of truth has become even more arbitrary, always hidden behind a thin veil of plausibility and verisimilitude.

Unseen Flora stands at the interplay between these areas: the collection wants to explore unreal but plausible histories through the visual depictions of the four illustrators, offering us an unprecedented glimpse into their imaginary botanical dimensions.

Unseen Flora was first born in 2023 as a generative digital collection for Bright Moments Artist in Residence programme. For the occasion, it was initially planned to create a generative collection for Artificial Botany. However, for technical complexities and conceptual purposes, we designed an alternative version of the work which later became so distant from the initial concept that we decided to completely divide the two series, despite the common focus on botany. With Unseen Flora, in fact, the series took an unprecedented turn: it seeks to propose a reflection on the concept of truth and post-truth in relation to the world of new technologies and, in particular, to AI language and image generators.

In this specific context, the perception of truth is shifting, seemingly aligning more closely with the notion of plausibility than concrete reality. For instance, post-truth indicates a deeply-rooted tendency to validate an assertion based on the public’s emotions and feelings, without any concrete analysis of the actual truthfulness of the facts being told. A tendency that also taps into the notion of confirmation bias, or the inclination to favour, believe and recall information in a way that reinforces one's preexisting beliefs or values. False assertions sometimes seem to be more influential in shaping public opinion the moment they reflect common ideas, biases, or emotions.

These concepts become even more relevant in the age of AI, now that models such as Chat GPT are regularly accessible: these systems leverage a precise human perception of the world that results from the initial, human-made training set. How a language model works is that it looks for the most plausible result for the inputted prompt: it is based on a syntax interlocking system, meaning that it looks for words that tend to occur together and which are often associated with similar sentences. Thus, the system does not rely on the actual meaning of the words used as it does not possess the capability to understand what is being proposed. For this reason, AI systems continuously generate plausible answers, post-truth realities that tap into what is commonly believed to be logical and credible, but not necessarily true.

It is at this new intersection between these ever-evolving concepts of post-truth, plausibility and falsehood that we set the stage for Unseen Flora: a series that is founded on familiar but somehow uncanny botany illustrations, on plausible but fictional histories and personalities. The series takes advantage of its fully digital presentation by navigating the blurred boundaries between truth and inaccuracy, making visible the dynamics that shape our information perception.

As mentioned, Unseen Flora involves a shift in Artificial Botany creative process: the past iterations of the work have always taken as a starting point authentic botanical illustrations, which were then reimagined through the lens of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). The central focus has always been exploring the transformative journey from natural forms to artificial ones, mirroring the organic morphing of real seedlings. Our tasks have always been confined to taking something already created, with a life of its own, and reinterpreting it through unprecedented techniques and looks. With Unseen Flora, however, we move backwards: instead of focusing on the outcomes of human-driven research, we delve into the lives of the botanists themselves, exploring their hypothetical perspectives on the natural world. An approach that allows us to generate unparalleled outputs, that could serve as potential starting points for further research and interpretations.

The concept of truth in relation to knowledge-building processes is an extremely contemporary theme that we have had the opportunity to explore in various fields and contexts, including the Trust project and the group exhibition 'Tell All The Truth But Tell It Slant' curated by Camilla Colombo, in which we participated in 2023 with Artificial Botany.