Electronic device for communication with plants
Year: 2015
Authors: Paloma Oliveira and Mateus Knelsen
Exhibited in: Campos Alterados – Museum for Contemporary Art (MAC) of São Paulo. Curated by Rachel Rosalen and Rafael Marchetti

Installation created for the rural residence rural.scapes where we start from the communication medium such as radio, very present in rural communities, and their diversion to create a device to propose an aesthetic experience of communicating. So, we ask: if the radio we heard the story being told in music and news, as you would hear the story of those who have no voice? What if we could hear what the local plants you have to say, many of them living for generations of men?

The installation consisting of a medium-sized plant in a ceramic vase with it coupled electronic circuits, and many radio receivers near the plant. Electronic circuits developed on paper and fed with bio-batteries (from lemons, cassava, yams, and other local foods of Sao Jose do Barreiro, the narest city from the residency), carry out the electrical conductivity of the plant reading and based on this reading, emit radio signals that can be tuned by any device capable of receiving FM waves.

Radioplant is a piece that references the research made by iconic individuals such as Cleve Backster and Augustine Lauder, whose work cannot be easily classified as art or as science. Particularly, their work investigate possible forms of communication between plants, and how the possibility of such communication can be the principle of an artwork.

Mateus Knelsen and I thought that this was a good motif for the Ruralscapes residency in São José do Barreiro (Brazil), that in 2015 called for works that integrated art, technology and the rural context where the residency took place. For Radioplant, we developed a series of devices that integrate knowledge of biochemistry and do-it-yourself electronics, capable of capturing some types of electrophysiological activity of plants, and translating this activity into sounds encoded by oscillators and FM radio signal transmitters. We then invited people for “listening sessions”, in which local people could bring their analogue radio receiver and listen to the “voice” of plants and trees: their transformed reactions to the stimuli to which they are exposed, such as luminosity and humidity.

Of course, the devices attached to the plants perform many layers of translation of signals, so we cannot say for sure that what we can hear through the radio is a “representation” of their physiological activity. But, in our opinion, that is not what is being argued with this piece. In fact, we think that the main point with Radioplant is to “re-present” (that is, to present once again) an old but very important technology (the radio). And while re-presenting this media, the piece introduces new agents in the communication process (plants), but leaves the question whether what we can hear is an “expression” or as fiction. We think that the pseudoscience behind the work suggests a curious field for artistic practice: that located in between science, art and fiction.
For this piece, we developed an extensive research on how to obtain electricity from fruits and vegetables, in order to provide power to the electronics we were using. We also gave workshops opened to the local community, to share what we learned about obtaining electricity from food, and also taught children how to build their own radio transmitter.

At the end of 2015, we were invited to show Radioplant at the Museum of Contemporary Art of São Paulo, as part of the Campos Alterados (Altered Fields) exhibit.