“We need acts of restoration, not only for polluted waters and degraded lands, but also for our relationship to the world. We need to restore honor to the way we live, so that when we walk through the world we don’t have to avert our eyes with shame, so that we can hold our heads up high and receive the respectful acknowledgment of the rest of the earth’s beings.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, Milkweed Editions, 2013

Anaïs Berck stands for a collaboration between people, algorithms and trees. As a collective, they open a space in which human intelligence is explored in company of plant intelligence and artificial intelligence.

This year Anaïs Berck researches the idea of ’An Algoliterary Publishing House’ in which the authors are algorithms, presented with their contexts and codes; and in which the content of the books seeds with trees and nature. This research in company of more-than-human presences brings Anaïs Berck to highly charged territories at the intersection of botany, computationalism and publishing. There, the implications of Western ideology, the centrifugal force of archivism and extractivism are brought into focus.

You are welcome to join us at the opening of the installation in the window of Constant on Thursday 30 June 2022 from 18:00 on.

This installation constitutes a first public moment in this research in which we hope to formulate a beginning of an answer to questions such as: Who and what is excluded, made invisible or exploited in the existent representations, discourses, tools and practises? How can we restore their presences in histories and storytelling? How can we heal and transform ourselves, our tools, our practises, our relationships to the world, our legacies? How can we help to destabilize the centrifugal force in botany, computation and publishing? How can we make books, databases, algorithms visible as objects of doubts and how to go beyond their established forms?

In this installation Anaïs Berck is represented by the humans An Mertens, Brendan Howell, Gijs de Heij, Guillaume Slizewicz; by the trees and plants whose spirits live in the herbarium collection of the Botanical Garde of Meise; and by a large set of scraping, analysing and generating algorithms.

In the framework of the window Anaïs Berck will organise a workshop on 9 September 2022 to discuss the ideas, tools, materials around the installation.

This research is supported by FRArt (https://art-recherche.be)

PS: Are you engaged with these questions and do you have some programming experience? Anaïs Berck is looking for new collaborators! Please email for more information to anais@anaisberck.be.