Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits. Solarceptors. Flowers - Inventors of Their Own Existence, 2025. RIXC publicity photo.

On March 16, 2025, the latest immersive artwork "Solarceptors" by artists Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits was premiered in Frankfurt (Bad Homburg), Germany, exploring "plant intelligence" by addressing the mystery of the evolution of flowers and the rapid emergence of diverse species more than 100 million years ago. The work is part of a three-year research project, "Plants Intelligence", in which artists collaborated with scientists and researchers from Switzerland to create a virtual reality experience based on an artistic vision of flowers as metaphorical "eyes" that follow the sun, synchronising the plant's circadian rhythms with the cycles of the planets. The virtual environment uses plants from artists' experiments with lupins, collecting data on the growth process, environmental effects and light perception.

The new immersive installation "Solarceptors" is on view for the first time at the exhibition "Unter Pflanzen" ("Among Plants"), which opened on March 16 and is on view until August 17 at the Sinclair-Haus Museum of Art and Nature, Bad Homburg/Frankfurt, Germany, where nearly 30 artists take a closer look at the "unnoticeable" processes of growth in nature, such as how plants take care of themselves, how they "exhale" oxygen or even communicate with each other. The Smits' artwork "Solarceptor", along with some of the other works in this exhibition, will also be on display at this year's RIXC Arts and Science Festival in Riga at Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, from October 16 to November 23, curated in collaboration with Swiss curator Yvonne Volkart and partners of the Swiss Science Foundation-funded project "Plants Intelligence".

More about the artwork


Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits. Solarceptors: Flowers – Inventors of Their Own Existence, 2025. RIXC publicity photo.

“Solarceptors: Flowers – Inventors of Their Own Existence” is an immersive virtual reality experience that artistically explores " plants intelligence" by tracing the origin and evolution of flowering plants, what Charles Darwin (1879) once called an "abominable mystery", unable to explain either the rapid emergence of flowers or their explosive evolution - why so many different species, colours and shapes of flowering plants emerged at once, in a very short period of time.

"Solarceptors' immersive environment takes viewers on a journey through five episodes, starting 100 million years ago, when flowers began to multiply rapidly in an astonishing variety of shapes and colours, marking their "green big bang" in the evolution of life. The experience then moves on to more recent events, such as the explosive proliferation of lupins in the Andean highlands, which solve Darwin's mystery by showing that evolution can proceed much faster than previously thought.

The virtual reality artwork combines scientific perception and artistic imagination to explore how flowering plants perceive and respond to light. The work reveals how flowering plants interact with light not only in photosynthesis, but also as part of a wider ecological and atmospheric system. Using 3D scans of lupins grown by the artists at different stages of development and environmental data from a previous experiment carried out by the artists at the Swiss Institute for Organic Agri-culture (FiBL), this immersive experience reveals that flowers are more than reproductive organs; they are sensitive light 'receivers' that connect plants to their surroundings in time and space. The artwork reveals the unique spatial and temporal dimension of plants, suggesting that flowers act as "sun receivers" - metaphorical "eyes" that follow the sun and synchronise the plant's circadian rhythms with the planet's cycles.

Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits. Solarceptors, 2025. RIXC publicity photo.

Alongside the virtual reality environment, the exhibition features videos and plant experiments that artist Rasa Smite, in collaboration with Raitis Smite, has created as part of the "Plants Intelligence" project in Switzerland. The video animation, which was created using artificial intelligence, visualises herbariums of Andean mountain lupines from the Zurich Botanical Garden, depicting the emergence of flowers.

Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits. Solarceptors, 2025. RIXC publicity photo.

The installation is complemented by a light sensitivity experiment, featuring Rasa Smite's artistic plant experiments, in which she explored how plants perceive and respond to different wavelengths (colours) of light and how the interaction affects their growth, flowering time and inflorescence.

The "Solarceptors" artwork is a collaboration with Kristaps Bitters - Virtual Reality (VR) programming and 3D animation, Jurģis Peters - Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) model training and programming, Lauris Smits - VR sound and voice.

The new artwork by the Smits is part of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) funded research project "Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant" (2022-2025) at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design Basel (Switzerland). The project's lead researcher is art historian and theorist Yvonne Volkart, who is also co-curator of the exhibition Unter Pflanzen.

Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits' immersive virtual reality artwork "Solarceptors", together with other artworks from the "Unter Pflanzen" (Among Plants) exhibition, will also be exhibited this autumn in Riga at the annual RIXC Art and Science Festival, which will take place at Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, from October 16 to November 23, 2025.

More information:
https://kunst-und-natur.de/museum-sinclair-haus/ausstellungen/pflanzen


Supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), within the project "Plants Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant, 2022-2025 at FHNW Academy of Art and Design Basel, Switzerland.