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Copy of Arboreal (DNxHD)_twitter.jpg — Arboreal

Unearthing structure in chaos

In Arboreal, we see how patterns of self organisation in nature can reveal how the world is filled with meek, mundane things that embody very complex mathematics. Fractal patterns are found in nature’s roughness from clouds and coastlines to tree forms and cell structures. Rohini Devasher’s artwork borrows from nature in fascinating ways; both to mirror and expand it.

Arboreal began with an exploration of L-systems or the Lindenmayer system, a formal grammar most famously used to model the growth processes of plant development, introduced and developed in 1968 by the Hungarian theoretical biologist and botanist Aristid Lindenmayer. L-System rules are recursive in nature which in turn leads to self-similarity and thereby fractal like forms that mimic branching patterns in the natural world. However, it is not modeled on any algorithms or programs. Via a deeply intuitive process, the artist constructs a successive set of trees through the gradual manual layering of more than 700 individual layers of video, within a video editing software. The result is an amazing array of spatio-temporal patterns, mimicking those exhibited by physical, chemical, and biological systems, i.e. plant structures, cells, tree forms, bacteria, snowflakes. They are not imposed from the outside in any way and are entirely self-generated within the loop. This footage is then sliced and edited by layering and manually stacking within a video editing software to create the work.

All images are courtesy of Project 88.

Medium: Video and Prints

Year: 2011

Copy of Rohini Devasher_ image credit Manisha Gera Baswani copy.jpg

About the Artist

Rohini Devasher is a painter and printmaker who works with a variety of media including sound, video, prints and large site-specific drawings. Her work has been shown at the Singapore Art and Science Museum, Kochi Muziris Biennale, Spencer Museum of Art, Usa, and Whitechapel Gallery, London, among others. She has had solo exhibitions at the Bhau Daji Lad City Museum in Mumbai (2016), Vis-a-Vis Experience Centre in New Delhi (2016), Project 88, Mumbai (2013, 2009).