The Mutis Expedition

Visual exploration tool for the botanical archive of the Royal Expedition of the New Kingdom of Granada

Nicolás Rincón Gille is a Colombo-Belgian filmmaker. His work includes Noche herida (2017), a documentary on displacement and memory on the edges of Bogotá, and Tantas almas (2020), Golden Star Award at the Tarifa African Film Festival.

His new film revolves around José Celestino Mutis and the archives of the Royal Botanical Expedition of the New Kingdom of Granada, one of the most ambitious scientific enterprises of the 18th century in America. This tool is part of the research and was built as direct support for that creative process.

The application, developed in React and TypeScript with Vite as the build environment, processes a catalog of more than 7,200 digitized botanical plates. Each record in the archive contains taxonomic metadata: scientific name, family, responsible party, provenance, and coordinates generated by BioCLIP, a computer vision model specialized in biological images that produces high-dimensional vector representations from the visual content of each illustration. These representations are reduced to three dimensions through vector space reduction techniques, producing X, Y, Z coordinates that the system uses to position each plate in space.

The model also assigns cluster labels that group the images according to perceived visual similarity. The interface offers two modes of organization: a taxonomic one, which distributes the plates by botanical family using a spherical projection on a three-dimensional surface, and a visual one, which positions them according to coordinates derived from BioCLIP and colors each point according to the cluster it belongs to.

The Mutis archive is one of the most singular documentary sets produced by the Enlightenment on the American continent. The expedition, directed by the Cadiz-born physician José Celestino Mutis between 1783 and 1816, generated thousands of plates of flora from New Granada created by native and Criollo illustrators, including Francisco Javier Matís, whom Alexander von Humboldt considered the best botanical illustrator in the world. This corpus raises questions that cross the history of knowledge and representation: what it means to classify nature from a colonial apparatus, what remains outside the taxonomic system, how the scientific image relates to the territory it intends to describe. Applying a contemporary vision model to this archive introduces an additional layer of interrogation, because the system groups the plates according to visual patterns that may differ radically from the original botanical categories, revealing formal affinities that Linnaean taxonomy did not contemplate.

The project functions as an orientation device within a corpus that, without technological mediation, is unmanageable in scale for a film research team. The 7,200 images can be explored in a paginated gallery with reaction and comment controls per plate, navigated as an interactive three-dimensional space with rotation, zoom, and auto-rotation, and filtered by family, visual cluster, or BioCLIP group.

Each plate also connects with contemporary scientific information about the species represented. The tool allows the film team to perform an initial full-scale reading of the archive, identify patterns, annotate relevant materials, and build a visual cartography of the set before any editing decisions or source selection. It is part of Artefacto’s practice of developing proprietary systems for managing and analyzing audiovisual and iconographic archives as part of the cinematographic research process, where software is also an instrument of thought.

Application (requires authentication): https://expedition-mutis-viewer-production.up.railway.app/