Karmina Šilec: DATA GARDEN • Minoriti

Gardens are spaces for new beginnings, for preserving old traditions, and for re-creating images. We enter the DATA GARDEN project through music generated from abortive plants. With an emphasis on the sounds of plants, DATA GARDEN is a space for reflection, empathy and connection. It allows us to explore how art can contribute to transforming society's understanding, and how listening transforms our perception of nature, history, and community.

We hardly ever talk about plants, and their names escape us. But our neglect does not affect them. They are indifferent to the human world, civilizations, and the course of events over the centuries. They seem absent, lost in their monotonous chemical dreams. Their lives unfold in a slow, molecular language that seems inaccessible to us—and yet it is in this language that the story of Earth is written.

They have no emotions, yet they are not closed in on themselves: more than any other creature, they are connected to the world around them. They have given life to countless species; they are the lives that have made Earth a laboratory, a place for invention and creation.

Plants do not run away, they do not scream, they do not attack; silent, persistent, and modest, they embody patience. They seem immobile, but that is because they live in a time that is different from ours. In our eyes, the only mobility they have is the one that the wind and waves give them. Masters of adaptation, they are able to survive where life fails other species. In them, nature expresses itself in its most thoughtful form: moderate, harmonious, lasting. Plants embody a peace that is not passivity, but an understanding of balance.

Humans have always sought inspiration in nature. Gardens are spaces for new beginnings, for preserving old traditions, and for recreating images. We enter the DATA GARDEN project through music generated from aborted plants. Now, speculatively, we hear them.

DATA GARDEN stems from our curiosity and desire to tell stories about alternative worlds. By creating another nature, inspired by biologically complex systems, we want to create an immersion into a mixed reality. With it, we become part of a new ecosystem, rich with networks of complex information. For DATA GARDEN we draw inspiration from the playful wondering associated with the excitement for the unknown, reminiscent of a child's exploration of the world. In this open continuation of our explorations with the mixed reality of DATA GARDEN, we hint at a future that will inevitably be saturated with connected computer media. But in DATA GARDEN the computer is not utilitarian in itself. We understand it as a material means that helps us dive deeper into what nature is to find our place in it. With its emphasis on the "sound of plants", DATA GARDEN is a space for reflection, empathy, and connection, exploring how artistic practice can contribute to transforming our understanding of society—how listening transforms our perception of nature, history, and community. At the same time, DATA GARDEN serves as a reminder that, even though something may be speculative and even seem larger, more unusual than what is known, the Real is even larger and even more "strange".

Polyphonic Vortex, ethnobotanical sound event

Polyphonic Vortex is a sound garden planted with waves in plant bodies – with sounds generated from abortive, emmenagogue, and contraceptive plants. The basic engine for creating electronic music is the transformation waves of living plants, where plants signals are converted into sound using patented sonification technology. The information obtained from different plants are then combined according to ancient recipes for abortive results. Polyphonic Vortex acts as a marker, which draws attention to the history and present of plant medicine, a practice that has been pushed aside and discredited.Polyphonic Vortex is a field which in the clash with modern times – but with an awareness of lost knowledge – offers a reflection on who has control over human reproduction and how.

Pharmakeia, hybrid visual scene

Pharmakeia is a garden of plants that do not grow, do not breathe, do not wither; they are artificially created yet remain vividly present. Their life derives from a code. In micro-robotic choreography, the movement of plants has no biological meaning – it is a process that places them in the role of post-natural entities. Their movement is programmed, and the tension between controlled movement and symbolic autonomy creates bodies without sovereignty, bodies under control. Pharmakeia plants are speculative organisms, unreal phantasmal entities, metaphysical apparatuses that function without their own will: cyborg post-plants, bodies encoded in plastic. When they move, though not alive, they are bodies without a voice – and that is precisely why they gain power: they draw attention to the relationships between knowledge, power, control, and nature.

Recomposition, conceptional installation

A hypothetical scenario from the scientific discipline invites us to consider the potential use of DNA as a space for new data storage, with plants serving as the infrastructure. Recomposition is a space where the stored, decoded part of the composition Phallus Tree is transferred from the cloud to the Juniper, shifting control over data from large corporations to individuals. In this unusual garden, data users become caretakers of plants, and plants become caretakers of information. The installation was created in the gap between the presence of plants and the absence of knowledge and reflects ethnobotanical solastalgia, a mourning for the relationship between humans and plants that was once the basis of everyday survival and decision-making. The work raises moral dilemmas about the limits of human intervention in the environment. How far should humans go with this new form of instrumentalization of nature?

Music and Sound • !Kebataola! ensemble, Živa Horvat, Andrej Kobal, Karmina Šilec, Danilo Ženko

Garden, space, light • Dorian Šilec Petek, Karmina Šilec, Andrej Hajdinjak, Jernej Ženko

Premiere • Minoriti Cultural Quarter, November 27, 2025

Production • Carmina Slovenica, 2025

In collaboration with Maribor Puppet Theater, Minoriti Cultural Quarter, and Choregie New Music Theater. The Public Body project was created with financial support from the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia and the City Municipality of Maribor.