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
Considering emerging scientific understanding of plant sensing and knowing the world, the economics of care, AI-led labour displacement and the greenhouse as a geopolitical node amongst these concerns.
Thinking about plants as sensory beings; of vegetal knowledge and worlding. Of electrical signals passing from root to shoot and back again. Of stomatas tasting atmospheres for chemical-led communication. Of a rich communicative life far outside human understanding. Reading philosopher Michael Marder, plant thinker, Monica Gagliano and 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, in a world where all living beings on the planet have equal rights through interspecies communication.
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 to meet economic returns.
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.
The final work will be a play; The Translator (Chitin tongues)– a speculative play where the actors are a small insectoid robot, and 6 greenhouse plants it is programmed to care for.
OVERVIEW OF PLAY:
The Robot discusses how its job is to care for the plants since seeds, its tasks, the data sources it uses for care based decisions. It reveals that it is programmed *care* and *love* for the plants, but also the economically contingent edges of its care (lighting & heating costs, difficulties and costs of migrant labour supply, economic returns of the plants crop value etc).
It dialogues on the planetary costs of this and whether at some point it is more sensible for remaining planetary resource management to let the plant die rather than maintain its life for another crop.
The plant responds cryptically as the robot’s dialogue progresses over the 10-15 minute play. The video imagery changes with speciifc trigger words: eg light, water, seed, death. The robot *translates* the plants response.
(Above: digital imagining of the play)
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
Robot:
Above: Rehearsing (or programming 😉 a small robot as performer. The plants have cardboard stand-ins.
The robot speaks in insect sounds to the plants as it performs its care duties, its dialogue is translated to english.
The plants respond with cryptic visuals interacting withplant sensor outputs.
Ive been considering ideas around:
– plant sensing, knowledge and worlding (how does a plant know itself and its world?)
-non-human forms of intelligence (plant and AI)
– AI led de-labouring and the economic edges of care (will AI made different care decisions to humans?)
-language and non human communication. (If an AI could speak with a plant would it even bother translating to english?)
Above: Root bodies
This short video is a test in TD combining plant electriophysiological data with speculaiton on how a plant would view itself: internal, from root to leaf, organic, slow-time.
For the plants’ visuals in the speculative play.
Working on this in touch designer with digital designer, Felipe Rebolledo
Research in progress: Circling The Sun