Monster 👹🌺🐙

"Monsters are bodies tumbled into bodies; the art of telling monstrosity requires stories tumbled into stories."—Heather Swanson, Anthropologists

Tin&Ed’s monstrous organism might be fictional, but its hybrid flower form borrows directly from nature: a digital crossbreed of parasitic plants and fungi found in the duo’s research. Its surface patterns are crossbred too: generated using a machine learning model that remixes different sea life including corals, sea slugs and starfish to spawn something entirely new.⁣

Monster is an ecological warning, albeit a cute one: a Frankensteinish beast conjured by human interference with nature. Monsters are ambiguous things—it’s likely we all contain the ability to be monstrous—but they increasingly take physical guises on our planet: think highly-destructive jellyfish blooms, recently dubbed a man-made plague.