Placebo / Hoax
"We devised and made eight prototype objects to investigate peoples' attitudes to and experiences of electromagnetic fields in the home, and placed them with volunteers. Made from MDF and usually one other specialist material, the objects are purposely diagrammatic and vaguely familiar. They are open-ended enough to prompt stories but not so open as to bewilder... The Placebo objects are designed to elicit stories about the secret life of electronic objects"
Reading about
Dunne + Raby's Placebo project, I thought of approaching
InfoBreath as a hoax visualizer. Work on the cyborg aesthetics of the plant-machine, and act as if it allows us to watch the Co2 / o2 transfer. Not quite sure why...
Because it makes people aware of the info they are transferring. Show them the info that pools at the roots. But I can do this without hoaxing. All its saying is that I should time the plants reactions human-like. A pause, a spurt: add some variety into the rate of return flow. Humanize the reaction. But also: think like a plant.
So, how does a plant think?
A plant would "feel"more at home with remote communication than humans do. After all, they rely on external events (bees, wind, being eaten and shat out) to propogate. When they accept Co2 they lose water, so have to be careful, letting in the Co2 through special openings called stomata. They take Co2, add Hydrogen, and release Water and Oxygen. Its as if when we ate we released necessary elements in the process...
So, it seems plants would be in tune with the tradeoff of survival, depending on others. So, how would this make them process the information they receive in the Co2? And what would they think of our thoughts?
Gotta mull over that one. For now, here's something not entirely unrelated from Dunne & Raby.
"...there's the conversation with nature that happens through the tools proposed by the project, and leads to the discovery of a new and different way of interacting with natural growth."
"Nature is not idealized, no moral about nature is proposed, no opposition between nature and the artificial can be seen, nature is not romanticised at all."