The Soul of Flowers

On 6 December 2023, during Miami Art Week, in the Tezos @ South Beach show at the Nautilus on South Beach, fxhash and Refraction built live minting into a wall: four upright screens, one work each; a visitor scans a code and the work generates before their eyes and is minted into their own wallet. The Soul of Flowers was one of the four, its wall label still carrying the working title Color Pencil Study, the counter in the corner of the screen climbing all day. By the end of that day one hundred and eighty-four of the two hundred editions had owners, and the edition sold out on 12 December.

The theme decides the colours of the pencils: Twilight’s deep blue and orange, Harvest’s wheat and yellow, Mystic’s night blue with a line of red, Eclipse in gold and black only, Aurora’s cream and rose, Meadow’s greens, Wonderland’s red, yellow and blue, Zenith’s greys; Oceanic is the ninth name, and since the code holds only eight palettes it shares Twilight’s. Among the two hundred editions Harvest is the most common at twenty-eight and Zenith the rarest at nineteen.

In September 2024, in a warehouse of the Zhongyuan Cultural and Creative Park, at the TAxT Taoyuan Tech-Art Festival, The Soul of Flowers became for the first time a room one could walk into: Light Matrix’s three walls in a horseshoe plus the floor, and with 3D glasses on, the coloured-pencil flowers grow out of the screens and into the space. Flowers, grass and background are split into three layers, generated live on site in TouchDesigner and sent to the walls over NDI, with dried flowers by Yong Garden in the foreground.

On the other side of the room stands a microphone. Speak into it about the person or the thing you cannot forget: the voice is transcribed into text, a language model reads its feeling and chooses eight colours and a name, and that set of colours is sent into the algorithm to grow a flower that belongs only to the one who spoke. This version is called the Eternal Dream Edition; it ran from 20 September to 13 October.

In June 2024 the series took part, as edition captures, in The Digital Art Mile in Basel; on 29 June the Sacred Forest concert by PTS and NHK at Liberty Square put the flowers on the stage screen beside the orchestra; from August to November a film version travelled with the dialog() Asian generative art exhibition through Tokyo, Taipei and Seoul. In 2026, with fxhash gone dark, the record of the two hundred editions and the minting generator itself are kept on this site.