Breathing onto the flower triggers a flurry of text, making visible the wireless internet traffic passing through the air. The infoBreath() imagines a world in which the carbon dioxide we exhale carries comprehensible information, and envisions the transfer of carbon dioxide to oxygen within a plant as a transfer of information: an information ecosystem.
The participant is presented with a cybernetic flower arcing from a frosted pane of glass. Rigged with a breath sensor and connected to Carnivore, an internet packet sniffer, the flower is cued in to the wireless network flowing in the space immediately surrounding it. Breathing on the plant triggers a flurry of text that makes visible the wireless internet traffic passing through the air around the viewer. The plant absorbs this information, analyzing the bytes of data for those aspects that seem more 'alive,' or human-generated, and releases those packets in a form comprehensible to humans.
In this way, the transfer of carbon dioxide and oxygen between human and plant is complemented with the wireless network traffic we release regularly into the air around us. This project imagines a world in which the carbon dioxide we exhale carries comprehensible information, and envisions the transfer of carbon dioxide to oxygen within a plant as a transfer of information: an information ecosystem. It imagines the plant, buffeted by streams of wireless data, sifting through those pings and packets for the few elements sent from one human to another, and reflecting those living packets of internet data back to us, in an elemental attempt at communication.