“Organic Worlds: Symbiogenesis in Art” brings the outdoors inside, replicating every intricacy of life from growing organisms to the biology ticking within them. As the gallery space flourishes with moving robots, hanging plants, diagrams and audio that delves into the background of each work, audiences are taken beyond the four walls and into an extension of our natural world.
The gallery is about biology, but goes beyond themes we’d expect like genes. Instead, it incorporates topics such as history, communication and to Ken Rinaldo — one of the exhibiting artists — technology. In a series of pieces about chemical languages in living systems, produced by photographing butterflies, lakes and rivers, Rinaldo finds himself using technology often for various outputs including light/dark values and texture mapping. Rinaldo said he welcomes the role of technology in biology, with a slight personal touch.
“A philosophy I have often with my works is find a way to use and more so misuse technology,” Rinaldo said. “If we use technology as intended, we get the same thing everybody else has, so I look for the cracks in the technology and have an individual expression.”
In a series of hand-drawn works by Rinaldo called “Synthetic Evolution,” he finds a relationship between an unlikely pair: living systems and machines or artificial intelligence. The process includes him looking at his hand-drawn work and correlating a series of words to it, such as “hubcap” or “pipedream,” and feeding those words into an AI system. The system generates millions of images, which he filters to find his ideal match. Rinaldo said that while living systems will always be more complex than human-made technologies, there’s an array of emotions present in technological expression all the same.
“It is meant to explore this relationship between machine and biological systems,” Rinaldo said. “Some of the emotions were excitement, revulsion, disgust, some of the other emotions were being absolutely thrilled that it would take something I had created and change it in such an abstract way.”
Different cultures and parts of the world frequently inspire artists in their work. A piece titled “Anicca Antenna,” the word “anicca” referring to the Buddhist concept of something in constant change, was the product of that inspiration for Rinaldo. The piece looks at the intelligence of soil as in part a living entity and on the whole connected to cultural growth.
“Every country inspires [my] work [and] every culture inspires in some way,” Rinaldo said. “Sometimes, because I go and meet other brilliant artists as a lifelong learner, for me the brilliance is places like UTD, where we get to experience this tremendous international community of others that bring so much wisdom and knowledge to the collective space.”
“Anicca Antenna” invites curiosity not only through its name, but also through the isopods that roam around the soil. The isopods’ movement is connected to robots that respond through movement, a feat of engineering that took six years. The person behind the code, TradeMark Gunderson, shared a story of his own: one where he found a way to incorporate his bachelors in computer science with art.
“I was always interested in the arts, that I always knew there would be some side of me that would be doing some creative thing whether it necessarily involved technology or not,” Gunderson said. “Once I found art and technology and ways to combine it, it was a natural thing.”
A large part of Gunderson’s work focused on the robot’s movement, as well as tying it to the living system. The robot has two modes, allowing it to transition from a dream state to an active one that changes which code it uses. As insect sounds from the piece surrounded the space, Gunderson said it was visualizing of the robots that guided him along the way.
“I want to say that the art leads the coding, to code is for me a very natural expression like drawing,” Gunderson said. “I can very easily visualize some behavior I would like the robot to have, and then the code starts to visualize with it.”
Each artist has a unique way to describe the people they work with and ultimately create a finished project with. While some describe their collaborations as rewarding, special or as a learning opportunity, Rinaldo finds what he shares with Gunderson a little more whimsical: fun.
“It’s play, and we often say how often the most fun is just making the project, inventing the project [and] thinking about the possibilities,” Rinaldo said.
Going forward, Rinaldo has many ideas for work he aims to build — and rebuild — with Gunderson. The former includes “paparazzi robots” that take a picture of you only when you smile, while the latter is an update to sound sculptures he made years ago called “Cybersqueeks.”
The SP/N Gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday. Its hours are 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays, and 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays. “Organic Worlds” is running through April 29, 2026.
“I often say that my philosophy of the art is that you need to seduce the eye and the senses, the nose and the ears before you can engage the mind,” Rinaldo said. “In a lot of tech work, you will see just screens, but for me I like an immersive space that shows me sculptural form.”
