By Mark Frauenfelder
People, especially city dwellers, are rarely preoccupied with plants. They might occasionally sniff a wildflower, wage war on a patch of crabgrass, or – on rare occasions – be thankful for the life-giving oxygen rain forests tirelessly pump out. But most of the time, people just don't think about their relationship with vegetation.
That's why digital artists Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau created the Interactive Plant Growing project: to remind everyone that while they might not notice plants, the plants notice them. For the last year, Sommerer and Mignonneau have been taking their installation around the world from Anaheim to Antwerp, providing a glimpse of the invisible connection between flora and fauna.
Upon entering the Interactive Plant Growing room, visitors see a large television monitor come to life, displaying an image of brown earth. The room also contains five potted plants: a fern, a vine, a tree, a cactus, and some moss. As visitors walk around or touch the plants, a virtual garden begins to grow on the monitor. The way the garden grows is a function of the electrical tension between the visitor and the real plants. Standing in different parts of the room or touching different (real) plants will cause a new virtual plant to sprout, or change the color, leaf orientation, and growth rate of existing virtual plants.
"A plant is like an antenna," says Sommerer. "At the roots we have installed a receptor which is connected to amps, filters, and analog-to-digital converters. These signals are transmitted to the artificial plant program."
Sommerer and Mignonneau wanted to get away from the "press-a-button-get-an-effect," mind-set of a lot of interactive art, because they felt it was important to retain some of the mysteries of the relationship between plants and people. But if you spend enough time alone in the room you can begin to learn some of the actions that control the growth of the simulated garden. For example the cactus is the only plant that can kill the garden. If you touch it, three black "lesions" appear at different points on the screen and quickly grow until they engulf the monitor, leaving a blank screen. Then the garden starts anew.
"People are astonished that the plants can sense something, without even being touched," says Sommerer. "People change when they really see that a plant is a living organism that should be respected."
Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau: +43 (1) 52 61 663.
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