Erin Fuller-LookingOutwards-04

The project “Green Music”, by John Lifton, a London based artist, was part of the documentary called “The Secret Life of Plants” (1979). Lifton produced music based on the bio-electronic sensing of plants to record the “stress” of their physical environment, such as light, temperature, the presence of guests, etc. In this project, the computers are constantly receiving information from the sensors attached to the plants, and converting the data into music. In this work it makes both the plants and humans creators in that they are both acting on each other to produce this sound; although there is no tangible interaction with the artwork, guests presence alone can be enough for the plants to react and create different music. I think that’s beautiful.

Documentary Clip of “Green Music”, 1979

I think this project is admirable just because it was created so long ago. It is easy to think the computational design is something of this decade or even just this millennium, but this project has shown me that people have been working on and progressing the field of computational design for much longer than I previously thought.