permanent installation, garching, de

Troika’s site-specific sculpture Ultraflora was commissioned for the Fraunhofer Institute for Cognitive Systems IKS in Garching, Germany. Emerging from an outdoor water basin, the work forms part of the institute’s new building and its surrounding landscape.

Ultraflora operates at the threshold of the algorithmic condition, rendering visible the hidden infrastructures that steer our technological society.

The sculpture explores technological transformation in an era where physical and virtual realities are increasingly enmeshed. Troika’s approach to the intersection of organic and artificial life investigates the evolving relationship between humans and technology and, here, renders poetic reimaginings of the organic through digital processes and 3D printing.

Commissioned for the Fraunhofer Institute for Cognitive Systems, the site-specific sculpture emerges from the outdoor water basin. It embeds itself within a hybrid ecology of managed flora and institutional architecture and blurs the boundaries between the natural and the technological through biomorphic form, industrial surface, and a visual vocabulary evocative of digital systems.

While its primary morphology mimics the bloom of a Dahlia, the sculpture is sustained by an algorithmic network or branching matrix that serves as a structural metaphor for the invisible networks that underpin AI’s existence and its hidden dependencies.

Ultraflora proposes an entangled ontology, where organic and artificial systems continuously condition, mutate, and co-constitute new modes of becoming – a state where traditional binary between the natural and the synthetic no longer exist.

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