This image was made at the Romantic Museum in Frankfurt in front of an original manuscript of Heinrich von Ofterdingen by Novalis, a key German Romantic text where the central trope in the Blue Flower. Novalis died at 20 from tuberculosis.

Images of virtually 'planted' gene edited wild chicory plants in relevant locations made by Anna Dumitriu using the Blue Flower AR app created in collaboration with Alex May. The physical gene edited plants represented here are not normally allowed to leave the laboratory in many countries but through augmented reality users can transgress rules and fill the world with them.

Dumitriu and May's artistic project explores the cultural history and morphology of the chicory plant and investigates how new plant breeding methods such as CRISPR gene editing can be used to create future healthcare and food benefits. Chicory inspired the idea of the Blue Flower in German Romanticism, and became a central symbol of the movement. It inspired Goethe’s concept of the ‘urpflanze’ or original plant in his “Metamorphosis of Plants”. The romantic movement was a reaction to the industrial revolution and held nature and emotion in the highest esteem. Now we are part of a biotechnological revolution, and again the blue flower becomes an important symbol. This time in a more complex position at the interface of nature and technology, central to societal explorations of what may be acceptable in synthetic biology, and how ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ may be defined in the future. Or as Goethe stated “the unnatural that too is natural”.