SPHERE 1

SPHERE 1 marks the beginning of the AVANTGARDEN. These early works test the garden as laboratory, ritual device, and technological organism.
The core question is direct: where is the line between cure and poison?
Across installations combining sculpture, homemade chemistry, elementary robotics, sound, and virtual environments, SPHERE 1 explores the pharmakon — asking whether every technological cure carries its own toxicity. Ancient remedies collide with algorithmic systems. Ritual meets engineering.
These works do not resolve the tension between nature and technology. They expose it. Wellbeing is framed as negotiation, not solution.
SPHERE 1 establishes the conceptual DNA that later evolves into SPHERE 2 and SPHERE 3: the garden as experimental infrastructure.

ELIXIR MACHINE
ELIXIR MACHINE operates as a ritual lab. A physical sculpture diffuses a dense mixture of more than sixty herbal ingredients into the exhibition space. Simultaneously, a Unity 3D virtual environment mirrors visitors’ silhouettes, translating their bodies into shifting constellations of particles and geometric structures.
The avatar begins as dispersed herbal matter, then fractures into algorithmically generated forms shaped through Perlin noise and Poisson-disc distributions. Each transformation is stored in a growing digital archive.
Historically, the work references compound remedies such as Theriak and Mithridatium — formulas that promised universal protection while containing toxic elements. The installation situates wellbeing between botanical tradition and computational abstraction.
ELIXIR MACHINE frames health as unstable chemistry, never purely natural, never purely synthetic.

GARDEN OF THE ELIXIR PILL
GARDEN OF THE ELIXIR PILL focuses on emergence.
Small robotic agents move across silica sand, rearranging terrain through subtle vibrational frequencies generated by pseudo-random algorithms. Their circuits partially incorporate the material they traverse, collapsing the distinction between environment and machine.
Above this kinetic field, a virtual layer generates continuously recombined philosophical texts using Markov chains trained on sources such as Boethius, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Aristotle, Anne Conway, and the Tao Te Ching. Meaning becomes probabilistic rather than authored.
A sculptural tree distills rainwater through clay, fungal powders, minerals, and historically ambivalent substances including cinnabar and realgar. Glass collectors gather water and aerosols as measurable traces of atmospheric exchange.
The installation functions as hybrid Zen garden, laboratory, and philosophical engine. It questions whether artificial systems can produce insight, or only simulate it.

SPIRITUS AGENS
SPIRITUS AGENS centers on ethanol, historically known as Aqua Vita, once medicine, now industrial solvent and disinfectant.
The installation circulates diluted alcohol through activated charcoal filtration. The processed liquid drips into a secondary vessel that emits Morse code signals spelling “I am still alive,” referencing the existential telegrams of On Kawara.
The work treats purification as ambiguous gesture. Alcohol disinfects and intoxicates. It preserves and destroys.
Drawing on anthropological ideas about purity and contamination, the installation frames cleanliness as cultural construct rather than fixed state. Health becomes a shifting balance within ecological and technological systems.