Sharon Yang Looking Outwards 10

The project developed by a woman practitioner of the computational arts is Kate Hartman’s Botanicall, first started in 2006, and now in display in Museum of Modern Arts in New York through many iterations. It is still an on-going project with a collaboration with three other artists that are Rob Faludi, Kati London, and Rebecca Bray. Its purpose was to embody a connection between the humans and the nature in both literal and figurative sense. Botanicalls is a networked sensing communication system with which the houseplants is able to make use of the channels of human communication such as telephone calls or Twitter. The conditions and the needs of the plants can be communicated. She and the collaborators developed the Botanicall kit; the first kit was a set of Arduino shields, the second included a custom, leaf-shaped PCB design. I admire the artist’s innovative idea of a device that enables the communication between plants and humans, which is something you would only see in sci-fi books or movies. It is also amazing how she was able to implement it with the technology that is available to her. Other works of Kate Hartman include Lilypad XBee, a sewable radio transceiver that allows your clothing to communicate. She is based in Toronto, OCAD University where she is the Associate Professor of Wearable & Mobile Technology and Director of the Social Body Lab. Her work spans the fields of physical computing, wearable electronics, and conceptual art.

Botanicalls Kit

Phone communication through Botanicall

Botanicall being used on a houseplant

Sources: http://www.katehartman.com/about/

Botanicalls