Lorraine Walsh

The Machine Learning (ML) animations, drawings, paintings, and prints are created and/or inspired via Machine Learning utilizing the Biodiversity Heritage Library open source database for training of thousands of images of vintage botanical drawings. The algorithmically created stills were selected from the animation and additional elements of herbarium specimens were added to the original machine learned image. The selected learned images were drawn from the low-res animation, painted in watercolor, and then sometimes made into digital prints.

Specifically, the images were used to train a model through StyleGAN (a type of generative adversarial network) which has been used to generate and customize synthetic images that look real. Latent Spacewalk (the latent space is a representation of compressed data in which similar data points are closer together in space) animations were generated from that model.

Sculpture, drawing, laser engraving, cedar wood, 2021

The In-Between is inspired by grafting–a horticultural technique for the natural or deliberate fusion of plant parts so that vascular continuity is established between them and the resulting genetically composite organism functions as a single plant. In this process, the upper part of the combined plant–the scion–is connected to the rootstock for a new hybrid plant. The sculpture has ten laser engraved drawings on plexiglass suspended within a wooden armature. The top row are the scions which will be grafted with the roots below. The space in-between the upper and lower plexiglass plates is where the grafting occurs. The ephemeral nature of this sculpture considers the balance and influence of climate change on grape cultivation and vine phenology today. Collaborator: Lei Han

The In-Between, 2021. Ten laser-engraved drawings on plexiglass-each 12” x 18”, cedar armature, 6’ 6” x 1.5” x 8’ 9”

Photo courtesy Virginia Harold, Stephen and Peter Sachs Museum, Missouri Botanical Garden.

Scions and Roots, 2021. Ink drawings on vellum, 12” x 18” (Selected drawings)

Animation, drawing, machine learning generative drawing and photography. Duration 3:16, dimensions variable. Stills, 2021

Cycles combines drawings from The In-Between sculpture featured in the Grafting the Grape exhibition at the Stephen and Peter Sachs Museum, Missouri Botanical Gardens (2021-2022) curated by Nezka Pfeifer. The short movie integrates drawings from The In-Between sculpture set against a background of machine learned images from the NASA Earth Observatory. Shifting through a palette of colors to represent a warming climate, the video of the Earth’s changing surface is generated from a model trained using StyleGAN2–Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), which essentially generates synthetic images from massive image databases such as those available at NASA. Collaborator: Lei Han

Time-lapse animation with macro photography, machine learning generative photography. Duration 5:07, dimensions variable. Stills, 2021

Homage to Arthur Clarence Pillsbury honors Arthur C. Pillsbury, an early pioneer in time-lapse botany photography who created the first time-lapse movie of flowers opening. In the 1920s, Pillsbury brought his then cutting-edge cameras to the Missouri Botanical Garden where he further researched botanical time-lapse photography. Honoring Pillsbury’s legacy, time-lapse macro photography was used to capture early phenological stages of a vine plant. The images were then used to ‘train’ a model through StyleGAN (a type of generative adversarial network) which has been used to generate and customize synthetic images that look real. The movie was exhibited in a gallery right above Pillsbury’s former early 20th century studio at the Sachs Museum (2021-2022).

Collaborator: Lei Han

3D animation, HD video, Duration 5:43, dimensions variable. Stills. 2021
Music by Ben Richter

A Degree Warmer symbolizes transformation from rivers to roots and delves deep to the cellular level on the planet, representing the power of adaptability, growth, change, and transport from an aerial view of rivers to a microscopic cellular level.

The animation includes the Vitis riparia (riverbank grape) and Vitis aestivalis (the summer grape, Norton, celebrated in Missouri). Also wrapped in the moving narrative are layers with varied meaning, including imagery and ideas from scientific research on plant adaptation.

The work utilizes two models trained using StyleGAN2 with a database (over thousands of images serving as the learning material) from NASA Earth Observatory, histology studies of plant life from the Berkshire Community College Bioscience Image Library, and frozen grape scans from Dr. Allison Miller’s (St. Louis University) research lab.

Collaborator: Lei Han

Photography, drawing, machine learned images, Epson archival prints, 12.5" x 19”, 2021

Vitis 1 and Vitis 2 print editions depict the grapevines against select palettes that represent new and old growth, depicted in colors to represent a warming climate. Included here are the original photographs, drawings, and some machine learned imagery from image databases of botanical illustrations utilizing the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. Collaborator: Lei Han.

Ongoing series. Archival digital print series with drawings and hybrid images. 2021-2022

Collaborator: Lei Han

Drawing, ink on birch panel, 16” x 20” x 1.5” 2020

Marking Time began as a drawing about glacial flow and melting ice terrains. with undulating lines folding and stratifying across a landscape exemplifying global warming. On March 11, 2020, the world was officially in a pandemic, and the drawing shifted. It became an account of marking time. Daily, I drew lines and recorded dates, like tally marks on a prison wall. As I marked each day, I considered time’s elusiveness during the beginning of the pandemic.

Accordingly, I recall Emily Dickinson’s 1860 poem Time and Eternity, where she writes: “A Clock Stopped.” And all of the best clockmakers cannot repair it. So it “just now dangled still.” Like then, and now, we welcome the expert clockmaker in all of us to move forward time’s arrow while lowering the heat.

Marking Time, 2020. detail

Afternoon of Manifolds, 2018, Animation, drawing, Duration 10 minutes, dimensions variable.

Afternoon of Manifolds debuted at a 2018 Claude Debussy Centennial Festival in Brooklyn, NY. Debussy’s seminal Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun was chosen as inspiration for the 10-minute movie, which is approximately the same length as the composer’s prelude.

Working with varied layers of ideas and chance, Afternoon of Manifolds slowly reveals an imaginary landscape with flora informed in part by differential geometries’ curves and surfaces with spiraling pseudospheres. Another stratum in the work imbues fluid dynamics in a river of spherical rolling elements. Afternoon of Manifolds seeks play in a confluence of geometric forms, hydrodynamics, and even ball bearings. Drawings are combined with code to weave together analogue and digital in a form of expanded animation with drawing. Collaborator: Lei Han

Installation view with drawings

Drawings (selected work), 2017-2018, ink on wood panel, 7 x 5 x 1-5/8 in

The flora in the Forest of Manifolds drawings are informed in part by differential geometries’ curves and surfaces with spiraling pseudospheres. The ‘river’ drawings are the ‘wavelets’ and part of the forest journey in Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem The Afternoon of a Faun, which inspired the musical response from Claude Debussy in Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. Both are depicted in the Afternoon of Manifolds animation.

Animation with drawings, Duration 4:33, 2016, dimensions variable

Inspired by John Cage’s silent composition 4’33” , Pleurotus explores drawing in analog and digital media, considering how they are more unified than detached. The drawings could have been created with code and the data-driven video handcrafted with its deliberate slow animation. Drawing, a so-called analog medium, may be disassociated with anything binary. However analog and digital expression can be inseparable. They can exist with each other and the combination thereof creates an aesthetic that observes one of drawing’s fundamental greatness: its capability to mediate sight and hand in a negotiation that simultaneously slows and expands our perception. The mushroom featured here, in both drawing and animation, is the Pleurotus or P. ostreatus, a genus of gilled mushrooms.

Drawings (selected work), Ink on Rives BFK, 22 x 25 in, 2015-16

The Asclepias series explores the impact of technology and mobile connectivity on our lives. As computers and networks sprout energetically across the world, I considered how technology functions in the ecosystem, enabling us to embody ideas while shifting social and personal interaction. The milkweed is critical to our environment, especially for the Monarch butterfly. And it contains many folk-medicinal remedies. It is also toxic, containing cardiac glycosides poisonous to humans and livestock. Thus, milkweed may rejuvenate, or it may contaminate. Correlating technological innovations with this plant, we may consider that as technological products sprout up, or germinate, they provide nutrients for some and uncertainty for others.

The Flyzone series uses titles culled from the language of war: Fly Zone, Landing Zone, etc. The resulting prints and animation express the transitory nature of life, while representing hope as in the print titled The Beginning. The final stage of the life cycle of the butterfly as depicted in this work considers warfare, and the stages of war, albeit in a subtle and oblique expression.

Sound Visualization/Animation, Dimensions variable, 2013

Voice Me is a sound visualization culled from a collection of recordings from skateparks across the United States, from Charleston Skatepark, SC to Tanzanite Skatepark, CA. The sounds were recorded by the skaters from the Sk8 the St8s adventure across the US.

The amazing Sk8 the St8s skaters that worked their way through half-pipes and bowls across the US with handheld recorders include Sean Thompson, Leo Thompson, Neal Thompson, Willem Steenstra, Niall Kingdale, Lou King and Nathan Richmond. Thank you.

Special thanks to designer and production assistant Chantae Shor.

Interactive installation, sound, animation, drawing. 2008-2010

Sound-Lines is an interactive sound sculpture composed of sensors that trigger archived sounds and animated words. The project was inspired by an ancient database and references a specific historical artifact called the Khipu or Quipu (a 13th century Incan device used for recording data). Inspired by this device, the collaborating artists created a 21st century database compiled of descriptive words and sounds that animate on a screen when there is human interaction. A sound and associated word/phrase, coded to be drawn at random from a database, is triggered each time a visitor touches a sensor. This animated word/phrase is projected on a paper screen. Over time the word/phrase diminishes and evolves into a single line. Thus each visitor leaves a mark. If the sensors are not engaged, the viewer will see a series of white lines, the visitors’ marks, on the paper.

Sound-Lines, a collaborative project, was supported by the creative initiative e-MobiLArt (European Mobile Lab for Interactive Media Artists). Collaborators: Cliona Harmey, Christine Mackey, Nita Tandon, and Lorraine Walsh.

Special thanks to external collaborators and technical support: Jeremy Bernstein, Peter Ceglavek, Lei Han, and Elliot Sinyor.

Leonardo Journal article: “SOUND-LINES,” Leonardo Journal (Volume 43, Issue 5, p. 502, 2010). Leonardo/The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, MIT Press.

Archival digital prints with photography, drawing, handmade paper

The Future Past series reflects upon global warming and the environment. Represented are images of cicada shells, amphibians, pollinated fossils and foraminifera. Key to the work is foraminifera microfossils: any of a large group of single-celled (usually microscopic) eukaryotic organisms, such as amoebas, ciliates, flagellates and sporozoans. They can be used to determine the age of sedimentary strata. As a result, the presence of certain foraminifera and pollinated fossils in limestone offer clues to corporations whose purpose is oil exploration on where to seek fossil fuels. Thus, they are actively sought after by fuel industries. They are also important bioindicators in coastal environments, including indicators of coral reef health.

Digital prints, animation, installation, 2004-2006

String theory merges two theories of modern physics: quantum mechanics and general relativity, which are mathematically incompatible, into a common framework. A fundamental premise of string theory is that the basic objects in nature are not point-like, but string-like. It suggests that there are as many as ten, plus time, for a total of 11 space-time dimensions. Visualizing extra dimensions was quite a challenge and one I endeavored to unravel in this series. My Superstring work interprets how these string objects, which loop, may appear in space. My initial task was researching string theory. I then selected and scanned relevant equations into the computer. These scans evolved into my own drawings of the theorems. The sketches of formulas developed alongside visual elements such as color, form, line, and eventually motion. I worked back and forth between to prints and motion media. Drawn images were incorporated into Flash animations, and animation stills were combined in the prints. In a review of this work, the art critic Nancy Princenthal wrote, “Lorraine Walsh’s Superstrings is … buoyant, it vibrates with the microcosmic activity of particles in motion, oscillating between energy and matter.”

Archival digital prints with photography, drawing, handmade paper

The Future Past series reflects upon global warming and the environment. Represented are images of cicada shells, amphibians, pollinated fossils and foraminifera. Key to the work is foraminifera microfossils: any of a large group of single-celled (usually microscopic) eukaryotic organisms, such as amoebas, ciliates, flagellates and sporozoans. They can be used to determine the age of sedimentary strata. As a result, the presence of certain foraminifera and pollinated fossils in limestone offer clues to corporations whose purpose is oil exploration on where to seek fossil fuels. Thus, they are actively sought after by fuel industries. They are also important bioindicators in coastal environments, including indicators of coral reef health.