Theo Triantafyllidis
Whitney Museum of American Art acquires two works by Theo Triantafyllidis

September 28, 2023–September 28, 2033
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Bug Sim (Pheromone Spa), 2022

Acquired with funds from the Digital Art Committee

A precious slice of microscopic life preserved in an intensive care terrarium. Through a moist glass surface and within lush vegetation expands a busy Colony of Ants. Slowly and painstakingly they are working to form a brittle purple mud into a structure they can call home. From this structure grows an entire forest of tiny flowering plants. Branching and blooming in every direction, they are calling to be pollinated by buzzing Honey Bee replicas. An Aromatic Snail and a Dung Beetle provide help, while a Storm Mantis and a Sugar Spider complete the ecosystem of microfauna, praying for a snack. All but self-sustaining, this closed terrarium system is engineered to simulate all the necessary natural cycles for the fragile community of organisms. The flow of nutrients, hormones, moisture and temperature constantly regulated under the sound of insects buzzing. An experiment in resilience and entropy carefully monitored by a mysterious figure, contemplating on the paradox of environmental repair.

Seamless, 2017

Acquired with funds from the Digital Art Committee and Keith Grossman

The difference between nature and landscape is the presence of humans. Here, the ideas of nature and technology are documented in the form of an ongoing dialogue – What is nature and what is technology in the absence of human intention and intervention? How would entropy work if suddenly all humanity were to disappear from the face of the earth, but all of its technological infrastructure were left to run its course unsupervised? How would the technological relics begin a conversation with natural networks and what new economies of survival would emerge. This is a story of underlying forces that shape what we perceive as our environment, intact or constructed. A story of alien invasive species, highjacking the e-commerce infrastructure of amazon and ebay to sprawl around the planet. Concealed, amorphous and abstracted organisms, trying to trick the all-seeing algorithms of machine vision, manufacturing mechanisms to survive and dominate over land and other critters. It is nature adapting to fight the threat of an AI singularity, and the Singularity trying to understand and map the vast network of Gaia and come to a mutual agreement on managing the planet’s resources while engaging in a dual game of mimicking behaviors that addle the boundaries between natural and artificial.