Ken Rinaldo | 2027
Radicle Botany explores the electrical, biochemical, and evolutionary relationships through which living organisms communicate, coordinate, and generate biological form. Moving beyond the idea of organisms as autonomous individuals, the exhibition investigates how life emerges through interactions among cells, microbial communities, plants, fungi, insects, animals, human cultures, and their environments.
Through living botanical specimens, suspended glass sculptures, projected microscopic imagery, and speculative hybrid organisms, Radicle Botany brings these often-invisible relationships into sensory and physical experience. Plants, roots, insect-like structures, and imagined anatomies inhabit an environment where biological boundaries appear increasingly fluid.
At the foundations of life are electrochemical gradients—differences in electrical potential and ion concentrations across cellular membranes. These ancient processes sustain metabolism, enable environmental sensing, and participate in communication within and among organisms. Some bacterial communities coordinate collective behavior through propagating electrical signals; plants transmit electrical and chemical information across their tissues; bees perceive electric fields associated with flowers; and organisms across biological kingdoms exchange chemical signals that influence behavior, development, and survival.
These discoveries challenge conventional distinctions between individual and collective intelligence, suggesting that responsiveness, memory-like processes, and coordination are not exclusive properties of nervous systems but can arise through diverse physiological processes distributed throughout the living world.
Central to Radicle Botany is morphogenesis—the emergence and regulation of biological form. Research with developmental bioelectricity, including the work of Michael Levin, demonstrates that patterns of cellular membrane voltage contribute to the organization of growth, regeneration, and anatomical structure. These electrical processes interact with biochemical signaling, gene regulation, and mechanical forces. Pathways such as Hippo–YAP/TAZ reveal how cells translate information about their physical and social environments into processes affecting proliferation, differentiation, and tissue organization. C
The exhibition extends these scientific insights into speculative artistic practice. CRISPR gene editing, synthetic biology, and bioelectric modulation become conceptual tools for imagining the plasticity of living form. If genetic instructions and the electrical processes that help organize development can be understood as interacting systems, what unfamiliar biological possibilities might emerge from their recombination?
Sculptural and imagined hybrid organisms conflate botanical, fungal, insect, animal, and human morphologies, proposing unfamiliar anatomies that evoke symbiosis, mutualism, and symbiogenesis. These speculative beings invite consideration of forms that might emerge through new relationships among species rather than through isolated evolutionary lineages. They are not predictions of future organisms but provocations about the evolutionary possibilities of biological interdependence.
Radicle Botany also investigates the chemical exchanges through which organisms influence one another. Plant-produced volatile compounds interact with insect sensory systems and human olfactory receptors; microbial metabolites and signaling molecules alter the physiology of neighboring organisms. Life appears as an ongoing process of molecular negotiation, in which boundaries separating organisms are continually crossed by matter, energy, and information.
These relationships have profound implications for how we understand agriculture, food systems, and environmental health. Indigenous ecological knowledge offers important examples of human participation in complex living systems. In the San Diego region, Kumeyaay communities developed sophisticated practices of plant cultivation, selective harvesting, seed dispersal, transplanting, and cultural burning. Their knowledge of oaks, elderberries, native grasses, and other plants reflects generations of observation and active ecological stewardship.
Such practices offer a significant contrast to industrial agricultural systems that frequently depend on monocultures, synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and fossil-fuel-intensive production. By simplifying diverse ecological relationships, these systems can diminish soil biodiversity, disrupt microbial communities, and undermine the regenerative capacities of landscapes. Indigenous land-management traditions and contemporary ecological research suggest alternative approaches that work with the interactions among plants, soils, microorganisms, animals, and human communities rather than treating these relationships as obstacles to production.
Radicle Botany proposes that intelligence and biological form cannot be fully understood as properties contained within individual organisms. Instead, they develop and operate through evolving networks of electrochemical, mechanical, metabolic, cultural, and ecological relationships.
The radicle—the first root emerging from a germinating seed—becomes a metaphor for these beginnings: the emergence of form through contact, signaling, and exchange.
The radical lies in reconsidering life not as a collection of separate species but as an evolving continuum of interdependent systems in which organisms participate in one another’s becoming.
In an era of accelerating ecological disruption and unprecedented technological capacities to alter life, the exhibition asks whether understanding these relationships might transform not only how we imagine biological form, but also how we cultivate food, inhabit landscapes, and participate in the living systems that sustain us.