 Resurrecting the sublime. Lava fields on the southern slopes of Mount Haleakala, the island of Maui, Hawaii. The turn of the 20th century. Hazy clouds dissipate. The forests are being lost to colonial cattle farming. One tree will be lost forever. The Hibiscus Delphus, Wilderiana. The Hawaiians called it Maui Hau Kauaihevi, the mountain hibiscus. By 1912 it will be extinct. The habitat lost. The plant lost. The relationship between the two lost. Could we ever regain a glimpse of what was lost? As a silhouetted woman walks down a corridor, the lights switch on. A few years ago a small group of synthetic biologists at Ginko Bioworks, a bioengineering company in Boston, set out to resurrect the smell of extinct flowers. Christina Agapakis, Ginko's creative director, went to the Harvard University Herbarium in 2016, where over 5 million specimens are stored. She selects a file. Searching the collections for extinct plants with her colleague Dawn Thompson, they found 20. Two would hold enough information to unlock the scents of their flowers, each lost due to human destruction of their habitat. A third would reveal what may be an even greater loss. The first specimen was in the Malvesi cabinet. It was the hibisca delphus wilderianus, from which she cut tiny tissue samples. The dry plant is handled with tweezers. The second was the Orbexilum stipulatum, or falls of the Ohio scurvy, last seen in Kentucky on Rock Island, in the Ohio River in 1881, before a dam finally raises habitat in the 1920s. The third was the Lucidendron grandiflorum, the Weinberg conebush. It was last seen in London in a collector's garden in 1806. Its habitat on Weinberg Hill in the shadow of Table Mountain, Cape Town, already lost to colonial vineyards. But this flower may prove to be completely lost. The project is bringing to light that a Harvard specimen, and possibly specimens in other collections, may all be incorrectly labeled. An old feud between two 19th century botanists exposed again. Christina walks down a corridor of cupboards. Back at Ginkgo Bioworks, the scientists could begin working with the DNA, once it had been extracted from the plant tissue and sequenced by paleogeneticists at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Technicians work in a lab. The Ginkgo team identified gene sequences that might encode fragrance-producing enzymes. These sequences of DNA were printed, and then they were inserted into yeast, which were cultured to produce the smell molecules. The identity of those molecules was then verified using mass spectrometry, giving a list of the smell molecules that each flower may have produced. In an office lined with books, those lists were sent to Berlin to the smell research and artist Cissel Tollas. Cissel began to reconstruct each flower's smell in her lab, using the same molecules from her collection or finding comparative ones to approximate those that aren't available. We can use technology to reach back into the past, giving us a glimpse of each flower, but we will never know their exact smell. Science can tell us which molecules they made, but the amounts of each are also lost. Building on that contingency, in London, the artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsburg designed a series of immersive experiences to reconnect the lost flowers to their habitats. These draw on the idea of the sublime, the sensation of the unknowable and exposure to nature's immensity that makes us consider our position in it. Using genetic engineering so we can once again experience a nature that we have destroyed is both romantic and perhaps terrifying. It is sublime. Artists tried to express this aesthetic state in 19th century landscape paintings, but unlike these images, even the most advanced technology can only give an incomplete representation. In a natural history museum, nature's contingency is trapped in time. The clock of creation and destruction stopped for us to look at. In the installations, each landscape is similarly reduced to its geology and the flower's smell. The human connects the two and by stepping into this abstract nature, they become the specimen on view. The smells are diffused and fragments and mixed in each installation, so every inhalation is slightly different. We can never fully experience the flower in the present without its past context. This is not de-extinction, but a technological sublime, allowing us a glimpse of a lost flower blooming on a hill, on a wild river bank, digital landscapes are shown, or on a volcanic slope. The interplay of a species and a place that no longer exists. As the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy says, the sublime is not so much what we're going back to as where we're coming from. The hazy clouds fade to black. Credits. Ginko BioWorx. Dr. Christina Agapakis. Natasha Audrey Chiesa. Grace Truong. Jason Cacoyanus. Dr. Jason Kelly. Scott Maher. Krishna Patel. Kit McDonald. Dr. Christian Ridley. Dr. Dale Saran. Atseed Siba. Dr. Don Thompson. Dr. Zhu Wang. Gust. Ness Lafoy. Iona Mann. Anna Maria Nikolescu. Stacy Woolsey. Nicholas Mbashi. Seisel Tolas. Written, directed by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg. ResurrectingTheSublime.com.