Ideologies of nature in a transhuman perspective: herbaria and inventory gaze

This article aims to reflect on the ideologies that operate within the visual representation of nature. To this purpose, it considers the long–term tradition of herbaria, i.e. books in use since antiquity that contain representations of plants, explanations of their virtues, and harvesting methods. Herbaria is the genre in which an inventory composed by nature is visualised and displayed as grouped into taxa with differential ranks, depending on the ideological discourses of the time, concerning domains, classes, species, proprieties, etc. To embed this taxonomy in these textual artefacts, the representation of nature is conceived and designed as a transparent figuration, even though this vision is culturally codified, being historically, politically, and therefore aesthetically emplaced. After a brief visual survey of the genre, I will focus on the Byzantine Codex Aniciae Julianae (5th century) and how its discursive production about the system–nature materialised a peculiar visual ideology. I will later consider some contemporary artworks by Sofia Crespo as automated herbaria that question the visual patterns and expectations of what we inventory as “natural”. In both cases, I will point out how representation is understood as an ideological codification, following Umberto Eco’s theories, and exploring the dialectics between transparency and opacity from a normative perspective. Finally, thanks to the comparative analysis of these two inventory models, where the collection of natural types shifts from the universe of the referent to the hardware systems with which Artificial Intelligence is fed, it will be possible to account for a shift from a discourse on natural ideologies to a techno–ideology of nature.