Exploring the Eco-Digital: Performative Sensing with Plants and Data

What is it about?

Dr. Rewa Wright and Simon Howden are the artist duo UnCalculated. They have been exploring the emerging field of posthuman design, developing new strategies of co-creation with the non-human (plant and algorithms). Co-creation with the nonhuman becomes an embedded quality of their interaction design philosophy, invoking the ancient knowledge system from Rewa's ancestral Māori culture. With the capacity to further adapt through a self-organising system of plant signals and bio-electricity, this research project proposes a new approach to interaction design informed by the Indigenous Knowledge system of Mātauranga Māori.

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Why is it important?

Moving beyond human centred design, co-creation with plants brings us closer to understanding their hidden electro-chemical processes, and increases our curiosity toward plants not only as a critical planetary biomass, but as sentient lifeforms we can co-create with.