What a pleasure it was to work with Leslie García on the latest version of her (a)live installation, Pulsu(m) Plantae.

People have always pondered and conjectured about the subtle mechanisms that plants use to sense, communicate and fulfill their biological needs. Whether it’s through electric fields or ESP, these biological networks are mostly the result of specific physiological properties, making them imperceptible to our senses.

In Pulsu(m) Plantae, Leslie uses different kinds of sensors to reveal some of these biological processes and expose the results of human-plant interactions.

This version of the installation was built during a workshop at the Proyecta Oaxaca festival in Oaxaca, México. During the workshop, participants built tools for observing and measuring different plants’ sensibilities.

I wrote code for receiving information from six different sensors and trying to determine some aspects of their behavior before passing the signals forward to Leslie’s sound generator.

The interface also displayed graphs of the six signals, and different videos depending on the sensors’ current values and history.