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Morticia's Lullaby
A vigil kept over a single flower, sung for as long as it takes to bloom and die.
In the understory of the Amazon Spheres in Seattle stands a single flower, native to the rainforests of Southeast Asia, that opens only rarely and briefly. A sensor rests against it and reads the temperature and humidity of its body, minute by minute. Morticia's Lullaby listens to those readings and gives them a voice and a face: the warmth of the flower becomes a heartbeat, the body of it a lullaby, and its slow cooling a descent through darker and darker keys, until only a bare fifth is left ringing in an emptied room. The work plays for the whole brief life of the bloom. It never repeats, and it moves in one direction only.
It is a lullaby for something that cannot be kept. A bloom like this one is spectacular and already dying as it opens; the work neither preserves nor idealises it, but simply attends — watching and accompanying the flower as it rises, holds, and fails, the way one sits with anything that is passing. What it makes audible is ordinary and unbearable at once: that a living thing is warm, and then less warm, and then gone, and that the hours between are few and will not return.
Sound
Everything sounds in C♯ — historically the key of mourning, and of tolling bells. Beneath the whole work an open fifth, C♯ and G♯, holds from the first second; lacking the third that would make it major or minor, it is neither grief nor comfort, only distance — and it is the last thing still sounding at the end. Above it, the flower's temperature sets a heartbeat that quickens with warmth and slows as the body cools, its second sound failing before its first.
A lullaby gathers on that pulse, as sparse as a plant's own sense of time, drawn from a small field of notes that loses tones as the bloom declines — from a tender mode, through the full minor, into something colder and more constricted — until the melody thins away and the heart goes quiet beneath it. Around all of it is the forest the flower came from: the steady wall of cicadas, a passing rain, a frog, a distant bird, thunder at the edge of the room.
Image
The bloom appears as a single breathing form of pale light on a dark ground. Its heartbeat beats at the centre and travels outward in slow rings; humidity opens and closes the body; the colour of the light follows the warmth of the flower. As the bloom declines the form shortens and bows, dims and slows, and begins to let go — shedding small lights that drift downward and vanish. Nothing in the image moves on its own; it is driven, moment to moment, by the sound itself, and it rests when the sound rests. What is seen is what is heard.
Present, or remembered
While the sensor reads a living flower, the work is bound to a particular body in a particular hour — its real warmth, its real decline. When the flower is finally gone, the work does not stop; it keeps the vigil from memory, a model of the same slow death held in step with the calendar, so that the watch is never broken and the time it keeps stays true.
Details
Artist Joshua Borsman
Year 2026
Medium Real-time generative sound and light; environmental sensor, web audio, projection
Site The understory of the Amazon Spheres, Seattle
Duration Continuous and non-repeating; the life of the bloom
Tuning C♯ minor, descending by mode as the bloom decays; root C♯₂, 69.30 Hz
Source The temperature and humidity of the living bloom; an internal model when the sensor is absent
Materials Web Audio and Canvas; every sound synthesised in the moment, nothing recorded
Joshua Borsman makes sculpture, sound, and kinetic work — staged in galleries, gardens, sidewalks, and orbit — that turns real signals into work that unfolds in time and refuses to repeat. joshuaborsman.com
© 2026 Joshua Borsman. All rights reserved.