I have been awarded an EU Digital Deal residency/new work commission, responding to the increasingly digital spaces of commercial food producing greenhouses in the Netherlands. I am working on this across 2024/2025, shepherded by Waag Amsterdam and Ars Electronica.
More here: EU DIGITAL DEAL
This project seeks to speculatively invert the near-future of AI robots as labour displacers, to ask what alternative, speculated care-based relationship could AI-enabled robots have within the plant and humans in the greenhouse environment?
Asking, can AI robots be sensorial beings, listeners and carers, connectors across species? And in particular, within the artificial greenhouse ecosystem, what could a shared wider-than-human umwelt of the greenhouse; human, plant, insect and microbe look like with AI robot as interspecies network nurturers and translators? As post-human philosopher Rosi Braidotti says; of “we-are-(all)-in-this-together-but-we-are-not-one-and-the-same” scale of worlding.
Research in progress: Circling The Sun
Of plants as sensory beings- worlding and knowing in a vegetal mode. Of experiencing time outside 1 second per second time base. Of being electrical- signals passing from root to shoot and back again. Of being atmospherical chemical tasters and communicators, expressing gas-bound chemicals to communicate with neighbours. Of a rich communicative life far outside human understanding.
Spending time with researchers at Wageningen University, looking at plant electrophysiological signaling, of automated greenhouses that draw on plant signaling to determine when to provide water, nutrients, light.
Considering this first time in over 10,000 years of human history when plants are cared for horticulturally by AI robots and not by humans.
Above: Work in progress: Mockup stage set for a play; The Translator (Chitin tongues)– a speculative play where the actors are a small insectoid robot, and 6 greenhouse plants.
Pivoting from Ursula le Guin’s short story, ‘The Author of the Acacia Seed’, which
imagines a distant future when humans can already communicate with animals and
insects, and are searching to communicate with plants, in a world where all living beings
on the planet have equal rights through interspecies communication.
Experimental script excerpts:
Robot: “I speak with you in chitin sounds
In tongues of insect wings and diaphragms”
Plant: cryptic video of leaves/branches
And later:
Robot: “I make decisions for you, who are
ground-tethered slow-dreaming in vegetal-time.
You breath in with light and out with dark –
your thousand stoma mouths
open to taste the air of the world.”
Plant: cryptic video of leaves/branches
