Concert for plants by plants is a series of live performances by plants for audiences of invited houseplants, mediated by the world wide web.
The piece was first performed on April 26th 2012, when a cherry tree in western Massachusetts delivered a live performance to an audience of invited houseplants in Chicago, IL. Attached to the cherry tree was a piezo sensor, which measured the tree’s vibrations. These were uploaded to the world wide web using an Ethernet Pro as a server, and a friend’s wireless router, configured to allow port forwarding. On the Chicago end, a processing sketch gathered the data and wrote it to the serial port my laptop. An Arduino attached to the laptop output the data to transducers, which were attached to ceramic saucers (and later, a plywood shelf) as the medium for the vibrations.
The piece has since taken on several iterations with a variety of performers and audiences, including several events and a longterm installation. The most recent event took place on July 18, 2014, performed by Illinois prairie plants.
Full Description
Concert for plants by plants is a series of live performances by plants for audiences of invited houseplants, mediated by the world wide web.
The piece was first performed on April 26th 2012, when a cherry tree in western Massachusetts delivered a live performance to an audience of invited houseplants in Chicago, IL. Attached to the cherry tree was a piezo sensor, which measured the tree’s vibrations. These were uploaded to the world wide web using an Ethernet Pro as a server, and a friend’s wireless router, configured to allow port forwarding. On the Chicago end, a processing sketch gathered the data and wrote it to the serial port my laptop. An Arduino attached to the laptop output the data to transducers, which were attached to ceramic saucers (and later, a plywood shelf) as the medium for the vibrations.
The piece has since taken on several iterations with a variety of performers and audiences, including several events and a longterm installation. The most recent event took place on July 18, 2014, performed by Illinois prairie plants.
Work metadata
- Year Created: 2012
- Submitted to ArtBase: Sunday Oct 5th, 2014
- Original Url: http://lindseyfrench.com/doc/concertForPlants.html
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Work Credits:
- lindseyfrench, primary creator
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Artist Statement
Motivated by respectful collaboration with the natural world, I draw on personal experiences with agriculture, ecological activism, and landscape studies. I see plants not as mere landscape but as individuals, the allure of technology as a social reality, and I am drawn to the contradiction when contextualized with ideas of nature. I delight in discoveries where tensions between humanity and the natural world are reconciled. Where are the slippages between nature and technology? How can the landscape accommodate both realities?
Driven by research, my work is a process of open inquiry. I work through ideas materially or performatively, creating ecosystems of interrelated projects. I choose my materials meticulously, with a concern for the embedded history. Live plants, wood, paper and text form tentative relationships that are strengthened when performed, printed, engraved, and sonified.
My recent work uses technological mediation to search for new forms of communication with the natural world. Aided by electronic sensors and algorithms, I engage with individual organisms through processes of signaling, listening, and interpreting. The work materializes as texts written in collaboration with trees, video performances of attempted dialogues with the landscape, and sound installations of distant and displaced forests. Attempting impossible conversations, I seek not necessarily coherent communication, but the discoveries that unfold from these gestures of exchange.