ANNO OXYPETALUM è un’opera dell’artista britannica Anna Ridler
Condensa un anno della vita di un night-blooming cactus in 3 minuti. Ogni mezzo secondo del video rappresenta un giorno e ciascun panel rapprsenta 10 minuti.
“Anno oxypetalum” – literally, “The Year of the Pointed Petals” – is a generative artwork exploring the intersection of time, nature and the digital world. It compresses a year of the life of the night-blooming cactus, a flower that blooms at fixed times, into 3 minutes.
Every half second of the video represents one day, and each panel represents ten minutes. As it progresses, the day’s length fades in and out across the year as the time of dawn and dusk shifts.
The timing of dawn and dusk is matched to London, beginning with the winter solstice in 2021. But every time the NFT behind the piece is sold, the timing of the video shifts to begin at the season in which the sale happened.
This timing, encoded algorithmically into the smart contract, is accurate up until the year 3000. In this way, the piece becomes a form of high-precision timekeeping, even though the piece references a more medieval form of timekeeping by sunrise and sunset.
This piece expands on “Circadian Bloom”, another piece that uses generative art to mimic the natural cycles of flowers blooming as a form of timekeeping over the course of a day.