the Cyborg Bonsai

The Cyborg Bonsai

2022

The Cyborg Bonsai by Cinema 4D

Unlike traditional landscape paintings, in this art reference the landscape, people and animals are placed in the bowls, creating a scene with a new aesthetic. Inspired by this artwork, I was reminded of the concept of 'Bonsai'. So I decided to try to put the traditional elements of landscape painting, such as trees and houses, in porcelain. Then, by combining them with mechanical devices, the movements of the machines drive the changes of the devices in the bonsai. This is my attempt to express the concept of a new type of 'cyber bonsai'.

The entire animated Bonsai installation consists of six parts: a robot arm(the creature), a large and a small Chinese-style buildings, large and small trees, a floating bottle, and a robot moon.

The start of the major animation is triggered by the robot arm. At the beginning of the animation, the robot arm picks up the small ball floating in the mouth of the bottle and uses it to fill the gap on the surface of the largest bowl, thus triggering the mechanism. When the gap is filled, the signal light on the box changes from flashing red to blue. The gears start to twist. The trees in the installation start to grow. The lights inside the large building slowly brighten up, the large tree next to the building progressively grows out of the ground and the robot moon begins to rotate. The fog gradually clears as the trees grow and the lights inside the house come on. The small building begins to rotate after the trees' growth. Finally, the trees retract back into the ground, the robot arm takes out the small ball and everything goes back to the way it was at the beginning.