A Botanical Resurrection: Professor to Visualize a Return of Vanished Flora
Sue Huang, the inaugural Rutgers–New Brunswick Laureate, brings together artists and scientists to explore botanical loss and restoration within the cultural imagination
When plants go extinct, they disappear twice: Once, biologically and then again when humans forget they even existed.
Sue Huang, an assistant professor in the Department of Art & Design at the Mason Gross School of the Arts who was recently named the inaugural Rutgers University–New Brunswick Laureate, is exploring this concept through her laureate project, Bodies of Flora. The project brings together Art & Design with the Chrysler Herbarium and the Department of Plant Biology in a collaborative process of creative research and development.
The Office of the Provost created the Rutgers–New Brunswick Laureate Program this year to elevate the arts and humanities across the institution and the broader community. Each year, the program will designate and empower a new laureate to foster deeper cross-disciplinary connections with the arts and humanities.
The project, to be developed during the 2025–26 academic year, will unite plant biology, artificial intelligence (AI), 3D modeling and visual design to explore botanical loss and the potential for resurrecting vanished flora and culminate in an exhibition and performance.
Huang discusses her project and how the laureate program elevates the arts and humanities and fosters opportunities for cross-disciplinary research and creativity across the university.
Tell us about Bodies of Flora and your project’s mission.
Bodies of Flora is a performance work that will visualize the resurrection of vanished plant species, beginning with digital processing of archival materials and specimens from the Chrysler Herbarium. The work will reanimate the plants’ “living” forms using emerging AI technologies and 3D modeling techniques. These speculative digital bodies will serve as the starting point for experiments in image, form and sound – translating virtual renderings into sensory, performative experiences.
The mission is to examine ecological loss not only as a measurable scientific reality, but also as a cultural rupture. I was interested in the idea that ecological loss operates on two levels: There is the physical realm, where we lose the actual body of a species and its material presence in the world, but there is also the loss of a species in our social memory, which feels like an especially profound kind of disappearance because we lose our emotional relationship to those beings. They vanish from our cultural imagination. The project revives these lost botanicals as speculative forms for visual and sonic experience, returning them to the collective consciousness through performance.
How did you come up with this concept?
While reading about the history of extinction, I came across the ancient botanical silphium, a now-extinct plant that was once vital to the Cyrene civilization in present-day Libya. It is one of the first species extinctions to be recorded in human history and is documented in several pieces of writing, including by Theophrastus in Enquiry into Plants, by Pliny the Elder in Natural History and by Catullus in his love poem Catullus 7.
I was fascinated by how this plant could persist in our social memory through these bits of cultural recording and how the plant left behind no remains, yet we could piece together a sense of its body and the role of that body in the cultural life of the Cyrenes through fragments of text and rough carvings on ancient coins.
Describe the multimedia aspects of this project.
Bodies of Flora draws on speculative design and brings together art and design methodologies, performance, AI and botanical history to create an interdisciplinary platform for thinking about what it means to lose a species – and what it means to remember one.
I will use AI to generate speculative 3D models of locally extinct or rare plants, drawing from historical descriptions, illustrations and preserved specimens. Rather than scientifically accurate recreations, these models are amalgams of memory and cultural materials – botanical ghosts. They will form the basis for new explorations, reimagined in sensorial form, and situated within a haunted, speculative New Jersey landscape shaped by the industrial infrastructure of our era.
Layered within the multimedia work, I plan to develop a literary reading that will be written through archival research and interviews with scientists who work closely with these botanicals.
Through this project, I hope to foster an expanded understanding of ecological grief and offer imaginative tools for carving out new futures that are different from the one currently anticipated.
Who are your collaborators?
I am curious about the relationships between scientists and the beings they study, and how these relationships shape our collective understanding of ecological loss and memory. This summer, I have been engaging in conversations with faculty and staff in Plant Biology and at the Chrysler Herbarium, including Donald Kobayashi, Nrupali Patel, Thomas Molnar, Nicki Graf, Harna Patel, Lena Struwe and Megan King. These conversations, along with visits to their facilities, have been invaluable in guiding the concept of the project.
I will involve graduate students from Art & Design in the creative research process, exploring new methods for compiling and processing text and image materials through emerging technologies. Currently, MFA students Assem Kiyalova and Anukriti Kaushik are dedicating time to the project, and their expertise will be vital to its development. Together, we will engage in worldbuilding – placing our AI-generated 3D models into speculative digital environments – and work in the studio to create new materials and experiences with botanical bodies.
I would also like to engage with graduate students from Plant Biology. I am curious about how these students might consider the 3D modeling of botanicals. I am especially interested in their perspectives on AI and its potential role in exploring extinction, ecological loss, and botanical resurrection. My goal is to bring together students across disciplines to jointly explore the creative and technical processes of generating new forms from archival materials and preserved specimens, and to see what emerges from this venture.
What do you hope people will learn from this project?
I hope people come away thinking about extinction and ecological loss differently – not only as biological events, but as experiences that unfold in cultural and emotional terms. A species can disappear from an ecological system and then disappear again when we stop remembering or imagining it. This second loss – the disappearance from collective memory – is harder to track by the numbers, but it is profound.
