Jorinde Voigt: Botanic Code

The concept of work

A botanical garden is characterised by the international composition of vegetation, the reproduction of the entire world in miniature, the categorisation, conceptualisation and naming, the research and preservation of species. For the "Botanic Code" project, Jorinde Voigt spent a year (11/2009-10/2010) walking through the botanical gardens of the cities she was able to visit during her travels. So far, she has developed "Botanic Codes" for the botanical gardens of Sydney, Berlin, Göttingen, Mexico City, Frankfurt am Main, Cologne and Bonn, with Rome, New York and Paris to follow. In this work, the performative element of her drawing is transferred to the movement of the walk, the path on which one crosses the garden. This is also subject to a spontaneous decision. The walk follows the premise of examining perception in terms of the reception of colours. The proportional colour fields created using an algorithm developed for this purpose are transferred to 3-metre-long aluminium rods of varying thickness. The result of the visits to the botanical gardens is a group of painted aluminium poles: an algorithmically developed "code" that thematises the walk and the perception of the parameters of colour, proportion, performance, season, norm and infinity, thereby creating a new matrix for perception.