A garden looks like whatever is looking at it. That’s the premise behind Parallel World, an installation by Brussels-based artist Adrien Lucca, working with a team of scientists, shown at the 2026 Ars Electronica Festival in Linz. The piece is a small indoor meadow — real plants, pink blossoms scattered through dense foliage — lit by a computer-controlled LED system that cycles through different lighting states at regular intervals. The plants themselves never move. What changes is everything about how they appear.
Seeing through a moth’s eyes
Under one lighting state, the garden reads as an ordinary bed of green leaves and pink flowers. Shift the wavelengths, and green leaves turn brown or nearly black, while the flowers flare unusually bright against their now-darkened surroundings — not because anything physical changed, but because different wavelengths reflect differently off the same surfaces.
Lucca’s reference point is the elephant hawkmoth (Deilephila elpenor), a nocturnal pollinator capable of distinguishing colors under conditions where human vision has essentially gone flat. Research published in Nature in 2002 established that the species can identify colors under light levels comparable to dim starlight — well past the point where human color perception shuts down for the night. The hawkmoth’s eyes extend into ultraviolet wavelengths alongside blue-to-green light, giving it access to visual information that simply isn’t part of human experience.
Lucca’s light sculptures trace the shifting colors of the sky during twilight, translating that transition into the garden’s lighting cues — so the installation isn’t simulating moth vision in a lab-accurate sense, but staging the idea that the same arrangement of plants contains more than one valid “true” appearance, depending entirely on the eyes doing the looking.