BioRhythms: Artistic research with plants, real-time animation and sound

In the video series 'Biological Rhythms', electrical signals generated by plants are sonified and captured to drive real-time data visualisations. From this live data, we will create a series of eight video pieces (see links to draft versions of the first four in 'Recent work, video links' section below). Living plants and the human body may appear to be very different entities, but they have many underlying confluences. Once such confluence is that both generate bio-electrical signals that pass through bodily systems. In 'Biological Rhythms' we will use these signals to generate real time visualisations, revealing the unseen bioelectrical rhythms of plants. Through the biological sciences, we understand plant meta- processes such as osmosis and photosynthesis, yet because their cellular structure is so delicate, plants are notoriously hard to study in fine detail. Sonifying plant signals affords a method to explore their bio-rhythms in an accessible form for a non-scientific audience. As part of our bespoke and innovative method, the electrical signals from plants are converted to audio and passed through the program Touch Designer, where the plant signals activate complex geometrical forms. Simon Howden composes 'human' music which is mixed live with the plant signals, allowing us to explore co-creation with living plants as a posthuman mode of artistic research.

Contributors

Uncalculated Studio School of Creative Practice, Queensland University of Technology Brisbane, Queensland, Australia Uncalculated Studio (aka Rewa Wright and Simon Howden) hail from Aotearoa New Zealand. We are practice based researchers using speculative methods to explore emerging technologies of sound and vision, with a focus on ephemera and frequency. Our performances blend bespoke sonics with extended reality, haptic and gestural interfaces, and we often co-create with the nonhuman: plants and algorithms. Notably, artworks have been recently included in Expanded Animation at Ars Electronica 2024, Federation Square Digital Screen, Bunjil Place Arts Centre, various Ars Electronica 'Gardens' (2020 and 2021), the SIGGRAPH Asia Art Gallery (2019), SIGGRAPH Asia Art Papers (2024), VIVID Sydney, the Wrong Biennale, Aotearoa Digital Arts Symposium, as well as numerous iterations of the International Symposium on Electronic Art (2013-2024).