New York-based artist Roxy Paine makes computer-driven machines that mechanically produce paintings and sculptures; he also creates hand-crafted replications of nature that are startlingly realistic. His work toys with assumptions about nature vs. culture and organic vs. artificial; it often confounds the distinction between the man-made and the natural.

His lifelike mushroom sculptures, life-size stainless-steel trees and machine-made art have been exhibited worldwide, including in the original Greater New York show at P.S.1 Contemporary Arts Center in 2000, and the Whitney Biennial in 2002. He is currently featured in Ecstasy: In and about Altered States, at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in Los Angeles and is working on a new site-specific commission for New York's Madison Square Park.

Artinfo caught up with him as he was installing his show at New York’s James Cohan Gallery, which opens January 14.

I was struck by the way the weed garden in your new show turns what would normally be an abomination into something appealing. Was that your intention?

That’s a big part of what I’m trying to do. Weed-Choked Garden is someone’s attempt at a garden, but it is completely overgrown. The weeds are doing the best—although they are also being eaten. In a way, there’s this same sort of conflict in my work, between this human desire to create a perfect, manageable thing—like a grid or a row or the garden—and nature’s other structures, which have their own logic but can’t be contained. So there are these other organic structures in there, with these interconnections, with these different species coexisting.

What draws you to that side of nature, to the weeds and fungi? We tend to think of them as the ominous and less pleasing side. If someone saw your garden in an abandoned lot…

They would ignore it or step on it probably.

But you redeem that side of nature, making it seem as if it’s very easy to make a pretty flower, and difficult to make this ugly weed.

I think that’s true. It has to do with taking the normal mode of perception, trying to jog myself out of that and find the beautiful in what’s not normally considered so. When I started dealing with the kinds of mold that grow on these weeds for example, I initially thought it was repulsive, but then I started to see these structures inside of it, and these colors, and realized it is quite beautiful.

So much of what we consider beautiful or not beautiful is, of course, just conditioned by culture. But it’s also constantly in flux, since our notions of what is beautiful or what is disgusting are always changing. But rather than say “the disgusting is beautiful,” I just want it to be a mediation on how we think and why we have these categories.

The other part of that is the painting and sculpture machines. You add a third element to the nature vs. the manmade equation, and that’s the machine. You have robots making something that is supposed to be a creative, a human act, whereas you make something with your hands that looks entirely organic.

Yes, mass-production is supposed to create sameness and a consistent object. I’m trying to play with that perception. And there are things like the Erosion Machine in the show. It’s this machine that is eroding a large sandstone block. I’m using this robot similar to those used in General Motors factories, to direct this blast of air with a silicone medium that is slowly eroding the stone.

That’s both what time does to a rock and how sculpture is made.

Yeah, it’s like carving —there’s that notion that an artist like Michaelangelo would look at the block of stone and see the form inside of it. But actually, this is even more removed from the hand because I’m using different data sets to determine the movement of the arm. The first block will use weather data, from a particular time and place—wind-speed, hours of sunlight, temperature, precipitation—to determine how and at what angle the arm will move over the surface of the rock. That’s the way it’s being controlled. But of course, to a very large extent, things cannot be controlled, because of the dynamics involved. But more importantly, because of the structures that are inherent in the stone. There are these ridges already within it, so what is being revealed by the robot is partly the essential nature of the stone. It’s like seeing the recording of the natural processes of the planet. That stone was created in a dune field in Utah 300 million years ago; the ridges are the way the sand was deposited by the wind blowing over it.

But you need a lot of robotics to reveal something that atavistic.

Yeah, it’s something that nature does effortlessly, but it would take tens of thousands of years. In a way, the Erosion Machine deals with the most banal sort of thing—this mountain of numbers and statistics stored at every moment right now.

Each object in the piece will be made from a different data set. For instance, the next one will use stock-market data, from a specific period, to determine the movement of the robot. Each block will become a portrait of those statistics, taking some of that stored information and utilizing it to do something quite ancient. It touches on this idea of geological time, which scoffs at our little human age of domination of the planet.

That reminds me of your earlier stainless-steel trees.

The tree evolved from doing the mushrooms and the fungus pieces and looking at these things as a language—the way something grows, the way it decays, the kinds of rot that grows on it. It’s part of a process where I try to learn each plant species I’m working with so well that I can improvise within their rules. Once you learn a language, you can create an infinite number of new sentences using the rules of that language.

You mean like figuring out the data set of that plant, like the data set that controls the robot?

Yes, breaking down these natural things to their components and then being able to assemble a new mushroom, by essentially using the rules of that species rather than re-creating or casting one. There are a lot complexities involved, like cutting out each leaf—there are about 5,000 leaves in that garden piece—and each species has such a distinct edge and form. There’s no machine I’ve found that can create that kind of variety, especially in a constantly changing way. Humans are still the best machines for doing, or replicating, something like that.

The trees grew out of that breaking down, and also dealing with a contradiction in materials. They’re made from the material most antithetical to the organic version; stainless-steel is very cold and industrial. The pipes those trees are made from are used in pharmaceutical plants, heavy industry and so on. There’s a transformative aspect to those pieces, an alchemical transformation that is a potential symbol of our advancement of technology.

Putting one of the trees in Central Park—as you did for the 2002 Whitney Biennialwas fascinating, because it reminded me of how that park is man-made.

The seemingly natural composition of the rocks, trees and hills is completely a theme—it’s a themed-park. It’s a constructed experience; you’re supposed to view it, and walk through it, and experience it in sequence. So having the tree in that setting was a great way to play off what the piece was doing.

[Suddenly, a large covered object in the gallery begins to pulsate, like a baby elephant trying to push its way out of a canvas bag. We both laugh.]

That‘s called Unexplained Object. There’s this Geiger counter inside that is receiving radioactive particles and using that to determine the movements of this constantly shifting form. There are 40 different pneumatic cylinders that push out for random periods of time, with a random interval between each one. So the form is constantly becoming something new. We’re being bombarded by these particles all the time—they’re altering the way this object moves.

Did you like dioramas and natural science as a kid?

I love dioramas. I like to take some of the conventions of that type of communication and turn them around a little bit. Usually in a diorama, the plants are supporting actors such as the moose or the bear. In my garden, there is no star prancing on the stage. It’s just the landscape, the plants, the weeds.

That can be read in a cynical way, as if you were saying there’s no such thing as an unmediated experience of nature.

I’m saying it’s a fascinating thing to think about. Nature is so enormous. But my approach to it is not cynical, nor is it an exercise in nihilism. It’s an open-ended discussion of how so much of one’s experience of nature is constructed. I’m not saying that’s all there is. I’m just thinking about these things—these are what result.

Warhol said he wanted to be a machine, and Jackson Pollock said, “I am nature”; where do you see yourself?

I need a good quote here don’t I (laughs). I think humans are both machine and nature. We’re incredibly complicated constructions of nature, and I want this incredible awe of nature to be there when you look at my work.

I think part of the awe is how close you bring us to the experience of it while reminding us just how far from nature we actually are.

I really want the work to exist in those two states simultaneously—as in the way the stone is being eroded by using this statistical information about the stock market, or school-test results. That’s an overt example of that, of being close but as far away from nature you can be. Although the stock market data is itself a portrait of nature, in the way one species on the planet has developed this system, and the way evolution has influenced it.

We’re pretty close to nature in your toxic mushrooms—the only thing missing is the chemicals that could either kill you or give you a hallucinogenic experience. Is that next?

Yeah, that’s my next project (laughs) Talk to me in 50,000 years.