The Flower Matrix is a mixed reality work combining a 3-channel 3D-animation installation and an Oculus touch VR world, with music composed by Edmund Campion, cello improvisations by Danielle DeGruttola, and vocals by Claudia Hart and Mikey McParlane.

Inside the Flower Matrix is a part of Claudia Hart’s Alice world, reinterpreting the Lewis Carroll paradigm as a labyrinth. Inside the Flower Matrix envisions Wonderland as the Interweb, covered by flashing emoji, the icons for power, money, addiction and control. Hart’s Internet is commercial stripway, the enactment of Casino Capitalism but at the same time, paradoxically, also a metaphor for a model of the mind and a site of transformation.

The Flower Matrix is specifically modelled after the ancient Roman mythological labyrinth of the Minotaur, an endless maze from which there is no escape. Hart has created a game world covered with pulsing graphical patterns made from emoji, and also from symbolic computer language and public signage icons, conjoined in animated patterns that throb and pulse hypnotically. Also inside the Flower Matrix are five original species of fantastical flowers designed by Hart and covered with the same pulsing patterns, randomly growing and decaying. This is an environment portraying an aesthetic of fakeness where technology has replaced nature, both sugary sweet and chemically toxic in equal measures.

Claudia Hart is an artist and associate professor in the Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. Having emerged as part of a generation of 90s intermedia artists examining issues of identity and representation, she was an early adopter of virtual reality.

Here, she has used 3D animation to make media installations and projections. Later, as they were invented, other forms of VR, AR and objects were produced by computer-driven production machines.

The artist explains, “My censored work has been shown internationally in public spaces and on various public platforms. It often references classical art tropes such as the Renaissance odalisque and Hellenistic sculpture.”