Neither Here Nor There: Botanical (mis)Communication
Pages 288 - 292
Abstract
Neither Here Nor There is a speculative installation exploring human perception of the natural world from the perspective of four plants. Probing the act of communication as well as the indeterminate gap between what is deemed human and non-human, the installation highlights the complex role that technology plays in our current understanding of the human. Standing in large pots around a meeting table, plants engage in a free roaming discussion about what they think it means to be human and about planetary politics. Key questions and terms are fed into GPT-3 (AI-based natural language text generator) and played as plant sounds. As the plants converse in this manner, no aspect of their conversation is intuitively legible to the viewer. Viewers are invited to use a decoding app on their cell phone that translates these plant sounds. In avoiding an obvious mode of human-centric representation, the installation places the viewer in unknown territory, asking them to consider what intelligence, communication, and cognition mean beyond the human perspective.
References
[1]
[n. d.]. To find the truth of a situation - an interview with bruno latour. https://holbergprize.org/en/holberg-prize/find-truth-situation-interview-bruno-latour.
[2]
[n. d.]. Špela petrič. https://www.spelapetric.org.
[3]
2018. Los Angeles Review of Books. Los Angeles Review of Books (2018). https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-critical-zone-of-science-and-politics-an-interview-with-bruno-latour/.
[4]
2023. Adafruit I2S MEMS microphone breakout. https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-i2s-mems-microphone-breakout/arduino-wiring-and-test.
[5]
2023. Music of the plants. February 9 (2023). https://www.musicoftheplants.com/.
[6]
2023. OpenAI API. https://platform.openai.com.
[7]
2023. PlantWave. https://www.plantwave.com.
[8]
Georgi Gerganov. 2020. Ggwave. C++ (2020). https://github.com/ggerganov/ggwave.
[9]
Sophie Haigney. 2020. The lessons to be learned from forcing plants to play music. NPR (2020). https://www.npr.org/2020/02/21/807821340/the-lessons-to-be-learned-from-forcing-plants-to-play-music. Publisher: Music Features.
[10]
Wenlong Li, Naoji Matsuhisa, Zhiyuan Liu, Ming Wang, Yifei Luo, Pingqiang Cai, and Geng Chen. 2021. An on-demand plant-based actuator created using conformable electrodes. Nature Electronics 4, 2 (2021), 134–42. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-020-00530-4.
[11]
María Castellanos” Mariacastellanos.Net. 2023. Accessed February 9, 2023a. http://mariacastellanos.net.
[12]
Ivan Poupyrev, Philipp Schoessler, Jonas Loh, and Munehiko Sato. 2012. Botanicus interacticus: Interactive plants technology. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2012 emerging technologies, 1. SIGGRAPH ’12. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/2343456.2343460.
[13]
Harpreet Sareen and Pattie Maes. 2019. Cyborg botany: Exploring in-planta cybernetic systems for interaction. In Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1–6.
[14]
Harpreet Sareen and Pattie Maes. 2019. Cyborg botany: Exploring in-planta cybernetic systems for interaction. In Extended abstracts of the 2019 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems. ACM, GlasgowScotland Uk, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.3313091.
[15]
Harpreet Sareen, Jiefu Zheng, and Pattie Maes. 2019. Cyborg botany: augmented plants as sensors, displays and actuators. In Extended abstracts of the 2019 chi conference on human factors in computing systems. 1–2.
Index Terms
- Neither Here Nor There: Botanical (mis)Communication
Recommendations
Plantimate: Personality Augmentation for Fostering Empathy Towards Plants
DIS' 20 Companion: Companion Publication of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems ConferenceOur interactions with the ecosystems around us have devolved largely to anthropocentric, transactional and utilitarian modalities. Non-Human life forms, particularly plants and ecology are perceived as resources rather than a legitimate entity imbibed ...
Animals, plants, people and digital technology: exploring and understanding multispecies-computer interaction
ACE '15: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment TechnologyUnderstanding interactions involving humans and computers has ever since its establishment in the early 1980s been a key foundation for the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) and its development. The idea that important features are going on ...
A Biocentric Perspective on HCI Design Research Involving Plants
HCI researchers increasingly involve plants in their interaction design research, such as using plants as novel interfaces or sensors. While research involving other living entities, namely humans and animals is regulated, there exists no guidance for ...
Comments
Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
June 2023
564 pages
ISBN:9798400701801
DOI:10.1145/3591196
Copyright © 2023 Owner/Author.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.
Sponsors
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 19 June 2023
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Poster
- Research
- Refereed limited
Funding Sources
- Berggruen Institute
- JSPS KAKENHI (Grant Number 20H05960)
- Provost Office Fund, The New School
Conference
C&C '23
Sponsor:
Acceptance Rates
Overall Acceptance Rate 108 of 371 submissions, 29%
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 197Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)78
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)6
Reflects downloads up to 13 Jan 2025
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign inFull Access
View options
View or Download as a PDF file.
PDFeReader
View online with eReader.
eReaderHTML Format
View this article in HTML Format.
HTML Format