Neither Here Nor There: Botanical (mis)Communication by Sareen, Harpreet; Clarke, Lauria Kakehi; Yasuaki [Available online]Call Number: DOI: 10.1145/3591196.3596828
ISBN: 9798400701801
Publication Date: 2023
Is part of: Creativity and Cognition, 2023, p.288-292
Description: 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.
