Linda Dounia’s AI garden makes the missing record visible

Linda Dounia wanted to know which flowers her grandmother had grown up seeing. In a recorded discussion in December 2024, she described how that apparently modest question became Once Upon A Garden. Her grandmother’s attachment to flowers had stayed with her after her death. Looking for a visual record led Dounia into the uneven documentation of endangered and extinct flora from West Africa’s Sahel region.[1]

The resulting work is on display at the V&A in London this autumn. The museum describes its final chapter as 50 speculative species made with image-to-image technology, curated by Laura Herman and Marc Barto. These are imagined flowers assembled from fragments of evidence. Their increasing visual polish is part of the work’s subject: how easily a convincing image can conceal the incompleteness of the record behind it.[2]

The word archive usually promises something retained: a document, a specimen, an image with a connection to an event or object. A speculative archive has to make a more delicate promise. It can give an absence a form without claiming that the form is what was there. Dounia’s work holds those two possibilities close enough for the tension to become visible.

Flowers assembled from other flowers

Her account of the project traces five chapters from 2021 to 2024. The starting material included photographs, herbarium records, publications and text descriptions. For the first chapter, she trained a generative adversarial network, or GAN, on both recorded and imagined images. A diffusion model supplied images from text where visual records were missing. The invented material outnumbered the real images in that training set.[3]

That sequence makes the source of detail unusually important. One model’s invention becomes material for another. A smoother petal or a more convincing stem can therefore mark an improvement in synthesis without adding an observation of the original plant. The process can elaborate a possibility; it cannot, by itself, turn that possibility into a surviving specimen.

Dounia’s interest in missing images extends beyond botany. In a February 2024 interview with Le Random’s Peter Bauman, she described returning to a transformed Dakar and being unable to find photographs of the neighbourhood she remembered. She also recalled her grandmother’s morning offerings of flowers to deceased family members, usually jasmine when it was available. These ordinary acts and places gave the work its personal scale.[4]

The question becomes more intimate than whether an AI system knows enough about a region. What would count as remembering a place that mattered to someone, when its buildings have changed and its everyday details were never systematically photographed? A comprehensive-looking image may be emotionally useful while remaining historically uncertain. Both properties can belong to the same picture.

When realism became the problem

In that interview, Dounia explained what happened when she fed earlier floral images into more photorealistic AI. New outputs acquired textures, small imperfections and even suggestions of dirt or dried patches. Their persuasiveness troubled her. For Flore Perdue, a related development of the work, she used code to obscure details with large dots, making viewers encounter gaps again. Removing information became an artistic decision precisely because the software had become better at supplying it.[4]

Once Upon A Garden’s final chapter, Synthetic Rot, goes further into deliberate unreality. Dounia describes 50 stills and 50 videos, with flowers combining different species on one stem and increasingly inorganic materials. Image-to-image outputs became starting frames for Runway Gen-3 Alpha animations. Recorded sounds of nature, machinery and work were mixed with music generated in Suno.[3]

The V&A’s presentation draws attention to the natural resources behind the machinery making these synthetic flowers possible. That connection gives the garden another material layer: an image of lost nature is itself produced through physical infrastructure. The work does not escape the world it depicts simply because its flowers exist on a screen.[2]

Dounia’s most revealing intervention is the decision to leave the lack of knowledge legible. The flowers invite looking, but the work’s distortions interrupt any easy belief that looking is the same as recovering. There is also a practical direction to that distinction. Generating an imagined past and recording a threatened present are different acts. The first can make us care about the second while there is still something living to photograph.

Report an error or suggest a correction