The Botanical Garden is an endless sequence of growing plant structures. The plants themselves start as points and grow out and unfold into complex organic forms. Some resemble real life, others become very abstract and alien. But all are formed using the real math — the real code of nature — that biologists use to describe actual plant growth and structural patterns. This includes leaf venation patterns, phyllotaxic arrangement of leaves and flower petals, Lindenmayer systems of growth, Johan Gielis\’ \”superformula\” modelling framework for natural forms, and such. The plants autogenerate, plus there is limited user interaction to generate new forms.

A slitscan is an image-processing algorithm that takes a very small slice of the visual field and appends it to a growing panoramic image. Slitscanning creates an alternate vision of space and time, a small sample of space is smeared across time, what is left are discrete artifacts of the visual space at instantaneous moments in time. Objects that remain static become continuous lines of color while objects that move across the scan line scan themselves in like a flatbed scanned moving across a document.
By controlling the number of scans made within a period of time a slitscan image can portray space and time at different aggregations, like time-lapse photography captured at different frame rates. I choose to make three scans, one that would take a minute to complete, one that would take a hour to complete, and one that would take twelve hours to complete. Breaking with the tradition of linear panoramic slitscan images, I choose to make the scans circular, one inside the other. By offsetting the rotations of the three scan lines based the internal clock of the computer, the speed and placement of the scans mimic the hands of an analog clock.