Digital technology can sense and interact with the non-human environment, including animals and plants. Over the last fifty years, artists have deployed the latest technology to create digital environments where people and plants interact.
This summer, Carlos Castellanos reports on his own iteration of this concept, PlantConnect, which is yet another digital installation inhabited by wired up plants [1].
In this case, the core of the system is an array of Microbial Fuel Cells (MFCs), which generate electricity from bacterial action. Specifically, live plants are configured so that the microorganism surrounding their roots act as MFCs. The voltages off these MFCs are read and fed into an analog to digital converter, generating digital “signals” from the natural activity of the plants. In addition, the air near the plants is sampled to measure CO2 levels, which reflect the amount of photosynthesis occurring.
Both of these sensor streams are converted into a pattern in 2 X 8 arrays of lights. These visual patterns are captured with digital cameras, and analyzed with visual algorithms. The resulting patterns are fed to an algorithm to generate music.
Finally, there is a CO2 detector designed for the human participant, who blows, whistles, or otherwise breathes CO2 into it. The signal from the input is fed into the system, interacting with the plant signals to change the behavior of the system.
Essentially, blowing into the CO2 detector causes the ambient grow lights to come on, which stimulates the plants and generates electricity and reduces CO2 near the plants. That reaction, in turn, changes the light arrays and sound effects, and eventually turns off the lights.
I think.
It’s pretty complicated and convoluted.
As with many such installations, the digital technology serves to “make visible” otherwise hidden processes (such as the photosynthesis and microbial activity) with what is intended to be aesthetic behaviors. The system also creates a rudimentary “conversation” between the human and the plants.
In the putative conversation, the plants generate light and sound, and “listen” to human breath. Humans puff at the sensor and perceive the sound and lights. These behaviors are loosely and, it seems to me, semirandomly linked by the hidden algorithms of the digital system.
I have to note that there does not appear to be any semantic content to this conversation. This is not a control mechanism, nor can it deliver messages beyond the aesthetic show. This is not a meeting of the minds (whatever minds may be present).
“In PlantConnect, bioelectricity, light, sound, CO2, photosynthesis, and computational intelligence form a circuit that enhances informational linkages between human, plant, bacteria, and the physical environment, enabling a mode of interaction that is experienced not just as a technologically enabled act of translation, but as an embodied flow of information.”
([1], p. 342)
What ii the purpose of all this? Part of the purpose is to show off the technology, obviously. (I’ve been there–shows are for showing off! : – ))
Is there any other point? Not that I can discern.
Not only does the installation have no specific purpose, the documentation gives no explanation or justification for the elements theselves.
Why is the MFC behavior interesting to the participants at all, let alone in the form of this light and sound show? Why is this specific human action (breathing into the detector) relevant to the plants? How are the arbitrary light patterns meaningful to either the plants or humans? How is the algorithmic noise generative music meaningful to either plants or humans?
Overall, this isn’t a new concept, though the technology is getting better every year, so the shows are more complicated (if not more interesting).
1. Carlos Castellanos, PlantConnect. Leonardo, 56 (4):337-343, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02306
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