Spring is here – and so is this year’s poster
This year’s amazing festival poster and our new springlike logo colour are here to mark the beginning of the festival season and a truly rewilded festival experience at this year’s festival! And we have been looking so much forward to sharing it with you.
The poster image is created by one of this year’s headliners in the festival center, Craig Ames, whose photographs are inspired by the English botanist and photographer Anna Atkins and her photographic record of botanical specimens ‘Photographs of British Algae – Cyanotype Impressions’ (1843-1853).
Like Atkins’ work once did, Ames’ is created using one of the cutting-edge imaging technologies we have at our disposal today, AI, for his series ‘Photographs of British Algae – AI Impressions’ (2022).
The AI rewilded image
Through processes of text-to-image AI the name of the real algae, in this case the one known by its Latin name Lichina confinis, has evolved into this almost creature-like flower that makes you wonder about nature, technology and the rewilding and diversity of art in itself.
In his project Ames uses a broad sample of the Latin names of the specimens that Atkins photographed and processed through a text-to-image AI generator, producing a body of work which was labelled and catalogued to create a new visual taxonomy of simulated algae. In this way, the simulacra intentionally distorts the boundaries between the real and the artificial, highlighting the growing disconnect between the natural world and the simulated hyperreality.
A rewilded festival season has begun
The launch of the festival poster marks the beginning of the festival season for us and you can count on a lot more content on our platforms in the next two months about all the artists, exhibitions, talks and workshops that will sprout from this year’s rewilded festival edition!