Pando Endo (2017)

Pando Endo, 2017
Realtime simulation with 4 drone cameras

PANDO ENDO is a virtual organism simulated in real-time. It is a root system, a plant and an infrastructure. It was developed from phone photographs of aspen tree bark, moss and roots. These photographs were converted into digital textures, programmed to morph together with a procedural system that functions as a root system. Four drones fitted with spotlights circulate the virtually simulated organism, examining it, zooming-in on its movements.

The organism has been tasked to breach virtual glass cabinets and taught to gauge and mobilise towards light sources. Textures crawl across its surface area and liquids trickle along its tentacles like clustered organic entities. Based on this programming, the root system has found its own navigation. It resists stationary exhibition to traverse the vast space in the empty warehouse . The organism takes its first name from the great Pando (Latin, “I spread”), a clonal colony of aspen trees estimated to be 80 000 years of age. Every tree is identical in DNA and connected to a single root system. As an organism, the Pando is a slowly moving creature capable of expanding our concepts of the natural, substantiating an organism so resilient to human’s modern history. Could future human or ecological infrastructures evolve like the connected organisation of the aspen trees and exist outside current centralized systems?              

PANDO ENDO was developed after the artist’s extensive walks through the forest. “In the humid air I came across a wet strong aspen tree, stretching from beneath the wooded floor towards the skies, looking like an alien creature from another planet with its wet bark and stark moss-covered colors. It has surpassed, in its age as a single living being, the entire history of human culture at civilizational scales.” Pando Endo was made as an art commission for Worm's first online issue, “Refuse: (v)(n)(-)”: http://www.wormrefuse.org/pandoendo

Installations

Pando Endo, Cuchifritus Project Space, Artist Alliance NYC, 2018

Pando Endo, Festival International de la Imagen, 2018. Manizales, Colombia.