I just stumbled across Untitled (Singing Tree) by Peter Coffin in Vitamin 3-D; New Perspectives in Sculpture and Installation. I’ve been thinking about the potential to connect trees to their environment (or perhaps each other) recently, not sure how this will take form i.e. primarily visual or an actual site specific work.

Descriptions I’ve found of Untitled (Singing Tree) are a bit thin (can’t locate video or audio anywhere which is a shame), Vitamin 3-D describes the work as using:

scientific instruments to give a tree a singing voice, encouraging audiences to consider the tree’s conscious potential and capacity to communicate - as well as its musical ability.

While online I just seem to find technical descriptions:

Pin electrodes (sensors), signal amplifier, computer with custom software, amplifier, horn speakers. (with David Robert)

Silent Barrage is an robotic installation produced by SymbioticA, The Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts at The School of Anatomy & Human Biology, University of Western Australia. The work aims to connect visitors to cultured nerve cells through an architectural/sculptural context, allowing users to connect and ’see’ microscopic worlds and in turn those microscopic worlds to have an influence within our macroscopic world.

Each pole in the arrangement represents a region in the culture dish, and the movements of the individual robots correspond to the level of activity in the area. The robots markings on the poles hint to the continuous neuronal activity, conjuring traces of “memories” of past actions. The movement of audience in the Silent Barrage’s space is used to stimulate the culture. Nerve cells activity usually happens when a certain combination of stimulations reaches a threshold; the same can be said about our decision making. The navigation through Silent Barrage is made out of a series of incremental decisions made in an overly stimulated environment, out of the context of daily life. The nerve cells are also out of context, removed from the brain they once belong to, they are cultured in an artificial environment, trying to make connections with the cells around them. The barrage of activity is a symptom, can pairing cells and the audience can help make “meaningful” connections that will quieten the barrage? Can it happen in a place which is nothing but quiet?

While clearly an ambitious and admirable work, it does make some dubious claims such as being “One of the very few real art and science works” when there are quite a few spanning various combinations of the arts and sciences (in this area alone Edwardo Kac and Ken Rinaldo have been prolifically producing work for years).

Originally seen at VVork.

InfoBreath (image above, video below) by Christopher Robbins is one of many works (what have become known as clients) produced which use Carnivore to collect internet traffic data which is then visualised. While many other works fulfill this visualisation role in diverse and interesting ways, InfoBreath provides a scenario where the invisible effect of physical interaction, breathing causing the movement of air, provokes the appearance of what is usually invisible in the virtual, the flow of data.

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…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.

For related work see Circular Breathing, Wind and Éventée, POD (Wind Array Cascade Machine) and Invisible Networks.

Wearable Forest (image above) by Ryoko Ueoka and Hiroki Kobayashi from the University of Tokyo is “bio-acoustic” clothing which is networked with a subtropical forest of the southern Ryukyu Islands of Japan. Equipped with embedded speakers, LEDs, an embedded CPU system and a wireless internet connection, the dress processes and remotely plays the soundscape of the jungle through the speakers and uses the LEDs to create patterns reflecting the activity level of jungle life. More than just a receiver sensors also let the user transmit pre-recorded acoustic data back to the forest installation, creating a bioacoustical loop.

Above is an interview with the works creators. Originally seen at Fashioning Technology.

POD (image above, video below) is an installation created with the Wind Array Cascade Machine (WACM) (image bottom) by Steve Heimbecker. It is a:

64 channel installation that uses 2880 light emitting diodes (LEDs) to portray a 4 dimensional picture of the wind (3-D plus time). Each of 64 “pods”, functions as a velocity or amplitude light meter of each of the 64 wind sensors in the WACM data network. POD is designed to operate from live streamed data produced by the WACM installed upon a horizontal (rooftop) location, or from recorded wind data previously generated by the WACM system. The POD installation is 3 metres by 3 meters across, and 1.75 meters tall (eye level).

Similar in presentation to Volume the fascinating aspect of this work is it’s ability to stream data from the WACM outdoor capture installation across the internet to the POD’s indoor reception installation (watch the video and look at the diagram for details). While on the surface the work is simply a visualisation of data, invisible data made visible, this networking of the wind is beautifully poetic - one of those works you’re glad you read a little more about to reveal it’s hidden depth.

For related work see Wind Code Image.