Rasa Smite & Raitis Smits (LV)
Solarceptors. Flowers – Inventors of Their Own Existence
Immersive virtual reality experience, 2025
Still from Solarceptors. Flowers – Inventors of Their Own Existence, courtesy of the artist.
Solarceptors: Flowers – Inventors of Their Own Existence is an immersive virtual reality experience that artistically explores ” plants intelligence” by tracing the origin and evolution of flowering plants, what Charles Darwin (1879) once called an “abominable mystery”, unable to explain either the rapid emergence of flowers or their explosive evolution – why so many different species, colours and shapes of flowering plants emerged at once, in a very short period of time.
Artwork’s immersive environment takes viewers on a journey through five episodes, starting 100 million years ago, when flowers began to multiply rapidly in an astonishing variety of shapes and colours, marking their “green big bang” in the evolution of life. The experience then moves on to more recent events, such as the explosive proliferation of lupins in the Andean highlands, which solve Darwin’s mystery by showing that evolution can proceed much faster than previously thought.
Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits are Latvian artists, founders of RIXC New Media Culture Centre (Riga), curators of RIXC Art and Science Festival and editors-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal and book series Acoustic Space. Together they create visionary and networked artworks – from pioneering internet radio experiments in the 1990s, to artistic explorations in the electromagnetic spectrum and collaborations with radio astronomers, as well as recent “techno-ecological” research with climate scientists, creating immersive experiences using scientific data, sonification and visualisation, artificial intelligence and XR technologies. Their projects have been nominated (Purvītis Prize 2019, 2021, International Public Arts Award – Eurasian region 2021), awarded (Ars Electronica 1998, Falling Walls – Science Breakthrough 2021) and shown widely, including at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Latvian National Museum of Art, House of Electronic Art Basel, Ars Electronica Festival Linz and other locations, exhibitions and festivals in Europe, USA, Canada and Asia.