Sue Huang is using speculative and critical design to bring long-dead plant species in New Jersey back to life in the collective human consciousness.
Her latest work is a collaborative effort founded in both science and the imagination – one that involves graduate students and mixes research, history, software development, visual design and plant biology.
Central to the effort is the development of a software tool – “the heart of the project in many ways,” Huang said – that reconstructs plant forms from historical descriptions, generating three-dimensional models using artificial intelligence.
“The project reintroduces lost or disappearing plant species from New Jersey’s ecologies into contemporary culture by giving them new form,” said Huang, the inaugural Rutgers University-New Brunswick Laureate.
Her laureate project, Bodies of Flora, will culminate with what the artist and designer described as a “lecture performance” that explores botanical loss and visualizes the resurrection of vanished plants.
Huang, an assistant professor with the Department of Art & Design at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, has enlisted help from the Chrysler Herbarium and Mycological Collection as well as the Department of Plant Biology and the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Natural Resources, all of which are part of the Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences.
She also tapped graduate students – including two general research assistants with the Art & Design department at Mason Gross and a software engineering student from the Rutgers School of Engineering – in critical roles to help her realize this blending of art and science.
Asem Kiyalova, a graduate teaching fellow with the Art & Design department who teaches undergraduate courses in design and typography at Mason Gross, is helping Huang on a website for the project, particularly the user interface and user experience aspects.
“She was my first professor when I arrived,” said Kiyalova, who hails from Almaty, Kazakhstan, and graduates in May with a master of fine arts degree in design. “I was dreaming about working with her at some point. And when she offered, I was like, ‘This is the dream come true.’
Kiyalova said that while testing the website, “We found that many people are not aware of the herbarium on the Rutgers campus, or even what an herbarium is, despite it being such a valuable resource. The website we are designing aims to highlight this space, bringing greater recognition to the herbarium and showcasing the important and fascinating work carried out there. In this way, it helps tell the broader story of herbaria and their significance.”
She also credited Huang for trusting her and others and involving them in “the conceptual part of this project.”
“I’m learning from her how to lead a project and how to make things happen from scratch,” said Kiyalova, who speaks Kazakh, Russian and English, received her bachelor degree in graphic design from Teesside University in the United Kingdom and worked for years in the advertising industry. “I’m so happy that I’m a part of a team. I’m so excited about the upcoming performance.”
Another Mason Gross graduate student, Anukriti Kaushik, is a lecturer with the Art & Design department who is pursuing a master of fine arts degree in design. She is conducting materials research and physical fabrication for the project.
Initially, when she started the project, Huang said her thought was to research scientific and historical archives “in which we would examine the morphological descriptions of the plants,” including extirpated plants – ones “that no longer exist locally in their original habitats” – and extinct plant species.
“We are looking at these descriptions, and I was thinking about ways of using this language, which describes the plant body, to bring these plants back into the cultural consciousness through a range of social practices and material explorations, including the generation of visual and audio materials” she said. “I use language to give these botanical ghosts a body.”
Kundan Kumar Reddy Digavinti, a graduate student attending the Rutgers School of Engineering, is working to make the project’s 3D-modeling software tool a reality.
Digavinti, a native of Chennai, India, who earned his bachelor degree in electrical and electronics engineering from the SRM Institute of Science and Technology in India, said he was “just scrolling through” Rutgers webpages when he came across news about Huang and her laureate project.
“The point which took my attention was the resurrection of the plants, the historical plans where we didn’t see them,” said Digavinti, further explaining that the challenge was to represent these lost plants based on archived descriptions of researchers from the past century or earlier. “It was like bringing back them to life in the form of art or something.”
He added that his role – “to produce a good artwork based on the texts that were historical” – is to bring “all the tools by using the AI, the AI models and integrate it into one tool where the user will get an output by giving one single prompt.”
Working on multiple artificial intelligence models was a “first for me,” said Digavinti, who is pursuing a master degree in electrical and computer engineering with a focus on software engineering.
“I was completely involved in building and designing a pipeline to generate images by processing natural language from the texts,” he said. “And since this was the first time that I was entirely working on a project from the beginning to the end working with multiple models, it was a good learning experience. It was also not my discipline.”
Huang also is collaborating with Megan King, a graduate student and the collections manager at the Chrysler Herbarium who assists with access to the collections and offers insight into herbarium practices, and Lena Struwe, the director of Chrysler Herbarium and a professor at the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences, “who has been very instrumental to our understanding of what needed to be considered in the software tool development.”
The professor said she has enjoyed having graduate students work with her on the project, adding that their mix of scholarly pursuits were critical to bringing Bodies of Flora to fruition.
“They bring their own set of skills, which enhances the work we’re doing on the project,” Huang said. “I have my own areas of expertise, but I see deep knowledge in research as knowing how to bring together the skills of others to move the work forward.”
“From another point of view, I would say the students bring vibrancy, excitement, optimism and a strong work ethic to the project.”
Huang will present Bodies of Flora on Friday, May 1, as part of a performance program at the Jersey Art Book Fair held at Mana Contemporary, a cultural center at 888 Newark Ave., Jersey City, N.J.
