Interactive Plant Growing

Interactive Plant Growing INTERACTIVE

PLANT

GROWING

The Sense of Touch Excavated through Living Plants Creating strands of Dead-life.

By Jan Hauters An article on new Art forms & Real Virtualities Thursday September 28, 2006

“

I

t’s hard to grow the

green one,” one of my friends impulsively says. We are three of us entirely immersed inside the dim space of the Interactive Plant Growing installation. The new media artwork’s title states it clearly: it’s interactive, and it involves plants. In the course of

this article I am going to take you through my experience of growing virtual plants.

It’s an interactive struggle for life mitigated through touch.

The creations can only be initiated by combining electrically charged human|plant transaction. Through the setup, and design of the work the media-art veterans Laurent Mignonneau and Christa Sommerer, have made sure that my friends and I don’t remain passive bystanders for long.

I experience a ‘vibe’: ‘a distinctive emotional atmosphere sensed intuitively’. It’s emanating from inside the whole installation. In that sense this technology is not utterly destroying a possibility for a deeper connection between me and this artwork of ‘mixed-reality’. I explore this further.

It might be that instead of nostalgia I ‘feel’ something reverberating from a possible future. A future in paradoxical relation to how we might perceive tactility combined with what we currently only know as an intangibility of the virtual; a utopian version of William Gibson’s Cyberspace: a space where we might touch the untouchable? Maybe the artwork introduces, as what I summarize from J.D. Bolter’s 2006 article for Convergence, the dawn of a redefined aura. What IS clear here and now, having entered the cave-like installation, is that we are intricately connected and part of the life created within this artwork. For me, acute questions are these: how are we connected? How sensitively connected are we with the visual results of this ‘symbiosis’? How much value do we put in virtual plant life? How much do we wish to share and negotiate this process of creation and destruction with others and with the artwork at hand?

In trying to answer these questions over the course of this essay I’ll fluctuate between my own experience and those of the people I have observed during our collective immersion within this four-dimensional virtual environment.

After entering this ‘womb of life’ we become the excited sentient batteries for an intangible jungle of virtual plants to be fostered through a computer-aided generated projections on a

large screen in front of us. Yes, my, or for that matter anyone’s, bodily electricity is captured through one sensor hidden under each one of the natural interfaces: 5 plants.

Truly, a ‘corpus-electricus’, most efficiently through our hands, is essential. As some participants try to use a silk scarf, a pen or even a credit card as ‘intermediaries’ with the plantinterfaces, not a dime’s worth of animation is deposited on the

screen. The system seems to reject anything else but direct contact with our skin.

It’s dubious as it’s comforting while it’s a bit intrusive.

These plants are each of a different species. The sensual differences between each one are a motivation to alter my interaction with them, but how with the technology implied in this space?

Even though the artwork is commencing to belong to the older generation of new media art, given shape in 1993, it maintains its classic status. It was, according to the creators, one of the first to implement a natural interface, such as plants. As much as Oliver Grau refers to Charlotte Davies’ 1995 creation ‘Osmose’ as ‘a simulacrum of nature’ this older artwork certainly has, from my perspective, its own way with interpreting Baudrillard as a gardener tending intangibles. Above all it still preserves, at least for me, an up to date problem for contemplation of how we deal with the sensitivity of touch between people, but moreover between people and biological plants versus virtual ones. Until now our touching of virtual life remains mediated through an interface.

The interface itself and the frustration of not being able to actually touch what is being created is made semi-invisible through its unmistakable organic nature. I can obviously relate to the sense of the organic. The smooth transitions made factual by touch between the organic and inorganic, tangible and screen life immerses me in the story: I become the cave’s tentacle touching its way into the jungle.

The fact that the plants are evidently biological is a ‘rock-hard bridge’ for any one of us having a problem expressing oneself in a sensitive manner through a sterile environment. Mind you, the Interactive Plant Growing installation radiates anything but sterility. It pulsates through its darkened surrounding and spreads dimmed light over the green plants in their pillar-held pots filled with brownish dirt mixed with moist humus. The sterility of the computer and the projector is hidden within this organic ‘flair’ that is emanating throughout the whole soft and obscured décor. The installation is an architecture unassumingly pumping data back and forth between its inhabitants: my friends, I, maybe soon you and always the plants - virtually tangible and tangibly virtual.

Virtually tangible as we, human-batteries, touch one another through touching the plants, as much as we touch the virtual ones mediated through the earthly plants in front of us. Tangibly virtual as we can touch the artwork and its artists who created a real virtual environment only existing through obscuring the plants, the cave, themselves and us instigated through interactivity, and supported by the complexity of algorithms.

It is argued that the higher the complexity of algorithms the better the interactive immersion might become. Although some things might be improved, I feel the artists succeed in providing just that. I touch and am touched by their algorithms. I truly would like to look under the hood of this computer and see how the parameters, matrices or formulas of these codes function. I myself am interested in algorithms from a sonic point of ‘view’, yet here in this space of visual creation their silence is golden.

It is perfectly quiet, with now and then a vague and muffled murmur dripping in from the distant outside world. That too makes me feel I’m in a snug womb. It supports me to focus on tactility. Fascinatingly enough technical contemplation on

software or hardware soon fades and makes way for my childlike compulsion to touch and purely create an herbal world in harmony with my friends. After all, although there is technology, taxonomy and hints of artificial potency, the artists’ conception is vigorously inviting my friends and I to participate in touch and play.

A whole environment is setup to stimulate empathy through the awareness of touch linked with creation, life and death.

Tactility is explored directly in touch with the growth of the algorithmic plants. I can manipulate them through their realworld avatars: the organic plants. Yes the ‘real’ plants become the icons, their reason for existence is merely by proxy. I can make my real goal grow by unifying my electric potentials with those of the physical plants. It’s a journey through reflections on my own tactile sense as a medium to transfer feeling-based data.

Or you, more traditionally, could turn it around. You might become as much as I am now that missing link: a variable in the algorithmic dynamic processes of creation, in synergy with bioplants, which function as agents between our duration of touch and their avatars you and I could create for them. As I see one as the avatar of the other and vice versa I can’t help but feel infected by a hype of the hyperreal.

I can understand the difference between my perception through touch when I interact with grass compared to when I do so with a cactus, but how is it that these virtual plants are actually changing my perception through touch?

I can caress, I can squeeze, I can tap, pat, press lightly, stroke, or brush. All of my methods of touch are scrutinized by the harmony of the tangible and the intangible plant-life evolving in very different rhythms around me: biological rhythm in harmony with algorithmic rhythm. Though quick in their decay biological plants are teasingly slow in their growth. Their algorithmic multiple counterparts however grow in a frighteningly high frequency and theoretically could be quasi infinitely sustained. The algorithmic species and their location on the screen are numerous compared to the five

compartmentalized cellular life forms. I need these rhythms and their rectilinear frequencies in concomitant tension to be able to realize consequences, tactile variations and differences depending on the opportunity and intensity of membranous interaction. The more intense and prolonged my touch the more chaotic or at least wild the data growth seems to become.

The effect of touch is not only observably polyrhythmic but also decisively life-cyclic. The more we touch the plants the more we can create virtually, the higher the chance biological growth will be disrupted. Where people need touch to develop emotionally ‘bio-plants’ might just die from it.

These scenario’s sprouting out of the digital realm change my perception on touch. The more happens not only on the screen the more I wonder about consequences and modifications of touch, as I link it to variable algorithmic growths.

How are these plants rooted in digits, altering my perception and execution of touch any further?

In our process of cultivating the earth we excavate it. Now I’m excavating a virtual plane as well as a spiritual one. I excavate my intensity: what do I really do to my environment when I touch it? Is my touch always supportive, constructive?

Each of the plants creates a pleasant and different method of interacting, except the cactus. Through touch I create light and with it simulation of plant life. But through that same form I can also destroy the image of floral life as well as that life of the plant I’m connecting with. The quasi perverseness is that the virtual

plants can only exist because of this intimate and potentially deadly interaction. Between people touch is sensual, caring or aggressive. Between plants and people it’s similar. Where in most cases sensitivity and care are requested sometimes as it is the case in this installation with the one cactus, the role of ‘brute force’ is somewhat reversed. Because of this one ‘iconoclastic’ plant I now have to seriously consider my sensitive relationship with any plant in the space. I create and destroy through plants: virtual or genetic they and the curvature of their life-line are indivertibly intertwined. Like in a neural network every parameter every variable, every participant is ecologically connected by synapses, the more connections the more possibility for creativity, for life… and death.

The cactus is as one of those synapses, a painful one for that matter. This cactus and the ‘killer plant’, as the artists call its algorithmic ‘evil’ counterpart, in opposition to the four other natural interfaces and their creative torquing algorithmic codes, use their power to ‘hurt’ me, slow me down in my decision to

eliminate the virtual still life, a life in suspension.

The tension and duration of life and death is played ironically by the function of the cactus. This ironic value of the cactus operates as an on-off switch for a virtual ‘apocalypse’. When the ‘wrath’ of the cactus is activated it looks like cellulose nitrate film melting on the screen due to prolonged exposure to the direct heat of the projector’s lamp, only here everything turns dark. I feel the artists are making a point through the cactus. If one were ever able to relate Barthes’ concept of punctum to this kind of art I’d dare say the cactus would be mine but then again, I also feel there is just that little ‘je ne sais pas quoi’ missing for the artwork to have piercing points, or is there?

Through the hand |cactus relation the artwork is forever gone.

Some might argue in the lines of Baudrillard by stating the projections are ‘…but ephemeral scenarios’. Seemingly the artwork is dead: long live the artwork! Each new interfaced creation is different, yet the same as they are created through electricity and algorithms. The paradox is utterly intriguing.

Frivolously erasing the algorithmic creation is almost off-limits due to the barrier shaped by the stinging sensation of the cactus.

It provokes me to stop and think, and hold off on the extermination of the screen plants. It is far from inviting and I try to circumvent it by sticking my fingers in its dirt rather than amongst its needles. It makes me think about how I sensitively touch each plant to create a landscape, how my friends and I semiconsciously try to synchronize our interaction during a group stimulated growth of the ‘plantscape’.

We have to negotiate amongst each other when to erase the screen for the following composition, ever so new. We even have to negotiate who’d go through the discomfort of interacting with

the cactus. In this case the pain does not result in gain, only in loss. The cactus assists us to stop and be collectively careful, to be in a sense democratic before proceeding with drastic actions of elimination. The cactus helps us to even sensitively interact with the other plants: intensely to erase sooner, slowly to postpone the pain. That what hurts is the intensity of touch between one life form and another, whether it is virtual or cellular. That what pains is that the sensation of creation or renewal, or differently said, of life, is irrevocably altering the life experience and expectancy of something else, be it virtual or cellular.

Nevertheless I am enwrapped in this tumultuous paradox. I’m simultaneously liberated by the finesse of creation, alternating as a solo project or as a communication with my friends.

It’s a pity I can’t touch the algorithmic plants, though the biological plants truly compensate as mediators in reducing this frustration. The different textures of for instance the ivy versus the grass or the aloe vera-ish plant make me fantasize about the sensations I would have if I were able to wonder around in this mysterious landscape evolving in front of my eyes. I’m enthralled by it. If I were able to touch the outer shell of the coded plants would I treat them differently? I want to belief I would.

We are wondering what happens with the plant-interfaces. They are touched so frequently, they remain in this cave only radiated on by the real reflections of the simulated artificial life.

As it turns out, according to the museum’s staff, they live a part of their life-cycle outside the installation and in the staff quarters where they can receive water and other special care away from human touch and back in contact, through sunlight rays, with their photosynthesis. When they are ‘revived’ they are returned, just like the algorithmic plants return again and again on the screen; identical and always there? Not quite, yet always in hand’s reach when recharged by your touch.

Pictures’ source: http://www.interface.ufg.ac.at/christalaurent/WORKS/IMAGES/PLANTS_PICTURES/Plant05.jpeg