Week 2(a): Case Study and Literature Review

Qingfeng Huang Posted on 25th February 2025 Posted in Research No Comments

LO1 (Realisation): Demonstrate understanding of your project’s themes and how they inform its artistic direction.
LO2 (Enquiry): Critically engage with academic and artistic research to inform project development and inspire innovation.
LO3 (Process) Plan and realise a complex self-directed project

Artists Design Installation Inspirations:

1. Case Studies:

“TALK TO ME”: This interactive installation has create by Rasa Smite, Raitis Smits in collaboration with Martins Ratniks, which introduces the idea of global connectivity between humans and other species. There are scientific hypotheses that communicating with plants makes them grow better. Installations online interface in combination with text to speech engine allows exhibition visitors and all online users to “talk” to the plants remotely, whereby uniting them into one network (Fig 1).

“Project Florence” offers a speculative vision of a future where our natural and digital worlds can coexist in harmony through enhanced communication. In this project, users attempt to communicate with or influence the plant through modulated natural language on a Surface computer. The human input is analyzed for sentiment and semantic content by a Natural Language Algorithm, which interprets this analysis into signals that modulate a light source projected onto the plant. During this interaction, the plant’s chemical and electrical reactions, along with environmental data, are observed. These signals are then combined with the linguistic input to generate the plant’s response. Although the plant does not fully understand the linguistic content, the transformation of the input into a response is influenced by its state, creating novel and unpredictable results. Through this project, the artists want to explore the intersection of nature and technology, showing how these realms can be integrated to create a dynamic and evolving dialogue, deepening our understanding of the life processes of plants and their interaction with digital environments. Project Florence approaches plants as reactive living matter which generates new perceptions towards how we interface with our natural environment. This creates the opportunity to create a rudimentary conversation with our natural environment (Fig 2).

“Plant Machete” is an artistic installation designed by David Bowen. This artwork is an intriguing piece that challenges the way we think about nature and its relationship with humans. The project explores whether nature needs to behave like humans in order to grab our attention. In this piece, micro-controller connected to the plant to read varying resistance signals across the plant’s leaves, and through this signal reading to empowered with a robotic arm and biosensors, giving it the ability to wield a machete to defend itself from humans. Through this work, Bowen asks us to reflect on our treatment of nature and whether we can blame plants for responding violently when we regularly exploit and disregard them (Fig 3).

Fig 3: Plant Machete artistic Installation by David Bowen

“PlantWave”: PlantWave measures electrical variations in a plant using electrodes that are placed on the plant’s leaves. These electrical signals are translated into pitch messages performed by virtual instruments stored locally on the hardware. User the PlantWave app to see how these wave forms change over time and listen as new textures emerge in real time (Fig 4). This device allow us to listening with plant voice and makes it impossible to ignore how much life and vibrancy exists around us. PlantWave helps us expand our view of the world and more clearly see plants as active living participants in our lives. This connection awakens an urgent call for harmony. It’s a reminder that we are not simply living on Earth. We are a part of Earth. This way of seeing the world helps us be a little more humble, and in general, better people. We’re more considerate of, not just plants, but animals and other people. We’re even more gentle and loving with ourselves.