Reflecting on
THE PLANT IS PRESENT
@ Hortus By Night 2022
A behind-the-scenes look at our 3 year creation process for the Plant Is Present, which ran for 3 weeks at Amsterdam’s iconic Hortus Botanicus and reached over 10,000 visitors from the Netherlands and abroad.
Three years ago today, I sat writing a first starting grant proposal for R&D of a fledging idea I called The Brain-Plant Interface. An astonishing fact had ignited me: humans and plants both use electrical signaling as a basic means of communication. A simple if somewhat far-fetched thought followed: could humans and plants use these electrical signals to communicate with each other? And maybe, just maybe, could this experience of more-than-human communication prod our Icarian species into a sense of community with and responsibility to the living world?
Three years later, I’m sitting here writing a reflection on a project called The Plant Is Present — PIP for short. A project that metamorphosed into a large-scale immersive installation at Amsterdam’s iconic Hortus Botanicus. A project that ran for three weeks in the 1400m2 Three-Climate Greenhouse and reached over 10,000 visitors from the Netherlands and abroad. A project where I moulted into we. We, the Otherwise Collective: a mycelially entangled assemblage of six friends/partners/collaborators /colleagues that scaled out of necessity into a sixteen-person team of emergent professionals.
The Plant Is Present was always naïvely ambitious and ambitiously naïve project. It was born out of a fanciful yet urgent need to believe that the world could be a beautiful place, that things could be different, and that we could contribute to making this so. It was rooted in love for our home, planet Earth, and anticipatory grief for the moment it would cease to be our home – expel us like a pathogen, like bleaching coral. It germinated in fascination with scientific discoveries proving what traditional knowledge practitioners have long known to be true: that human bodies and plant bodies, neural networks and mycorrhizal networks, social systems and ecosystems are all variations on a theme. And it was fertilized by our conviction from 3 years spent mashing up behavioral science with persuasive communication that we could use our understanding of the mind to change minds, that when it came to the big problems, care and belonging were better long-term motivators than fear and guilt, and that making the invisible visible and the big picture intimate was the key to triggering action.
While the project’s intense creation period rendered regular updates impossible, we’re now happy to share a look-back at the fascinating process and magical final product. Until the next time, we’ll be practicing what we learned from the plants: slow down, attune, draw what you need to you, cultivate a semi-permeable membrane, never mistake force for grounding, breathe. <3
SCATTERING THE SEEDS
January 2023
Three weeks & 10,000 visitors later, The Plant Is Present closed its doors. As our piece aimed to be a first step for our visitors, we wanted to equip them with the resources to become ambassadors of convivial environmentalism. We sent them off with custom-printed, plantable souvenir cards. Via a QR code, visitors could access our open source directory of resources for further learning, hands-on activism, and prompts for creative participation. The cards also featured a quote: “What will you do with the gifts of the living world?”
SPREADING BETTER STORIES
January 2023
News outlets, cultural media, and influencers alike visited The Plant Is Present during Hortus By Night. They helped amplify our message: We are a part of nature, not apart from nature. Otherwise received praise from critics for the rigor our long-term interdisciplinary research & development process brought to the show: “Most immersive shows end up sacrificing artistic depth and coherent meaning for pretty lights & tech. But you managed to do both.”
THREE WEEKS OF HORTUS BY NIGHT
December 18th -January 9th
Each night from 17.00-22.00, we welcomed visitors to journey through the Three-Climate Greenhouse and immerse themselves in an interactive playground with plants. Our team worked tirelessly to keep the tech working in a humid greenhouse, troubleshoot the inevitable logistical challenges, and host a wide range of audience members — from toddlers to grandparents, from Hortus regulars to holiday tourists, and from plant experts and tech enthusiasts to casual passersby who were lured into the garden’s open gate by pretty lights and the smell of glühwein.
MULTIDISCIPLINARY SYMPOSIUM
December 22nd 2022
As part of our programming during Hortus By Night, we hosted a panel bringing together our multidisciplinary advisors to talk about the human relationship with nature through the lens of art, science, and tech. The interactive panel was moderated by journalist & documentary-maker Dore van Duivenbode, and featured project leads Anna Riley-Shepard (artistic direction) & Fernando Diaz Smith (technical direction), ecologist Dr. Jerry van Dijk, plant physiologist Dr. Karen Kloth, and poet Neil Shepard. The talk attracted over 100 audience members and was recorded as a podcast, accessible here.
OPENING NIGHT!
December 18th 2022
After three years of development and six weeks of intensely demanding work, The Plant Is Present saw the light… of night! As Hortus By Night opened its gates to the public, we toured critics, media representatives, influencers, and sponsors through the greenhouse’s three rooms: the tropics, where we made plants’ four main communication systems visible and audible, the desert, where we zoomed in on the basic language of electrical signaling that humans and plants share, and the subtropics, where we enabled humans to use this language to interact directly with the room’s botanical web via brainwaves and touch.
THE FINAL SPRINT
December 2022
T-2 weeks to the opening, and we received a surprise visit from a government representative telling us our electrical wiring in the greenhouse didn’t meet the regulatory standard and had to be redone — even though it was for a temporary exhibition. We couldn’t continue with our site-specific development and refinement of the light, sound, and interactives until the grid was back in place, so our 16-person team worked day and night with the Hortus to make the necessary alterations. Within 3 days, we re-did what had taken us 3 weeks to lay the first time. And, then, between giving each other inspiring pep talks, taking breaks for delivered dinners, and holding each other through 4am work session tears, the pieces started to fall into place. Lights on, sound on, interactives online, hard decisions and brilliant last minute solutions. The Plant Is Present emerged just in time.
OTHERWISE IN RESIDENCE AT HORTUS
November 2022
The Hortus is a such unique location and we decided to use the gorgeous plants in the Three-Climate Greenhouse as our protagonists. This meant we needed to create most of the installation onsite. With winding paths snaking through dense vegetation, we could only see how best to light, project on, or fix sensors to a certain plant once we brought those lights, projectors, sensors, and electrical wiring into the greenhouse. Our exhibition landscape was also subject to constant change — one giant lily pad we were going to prominently feature even disintegrated in the middle of the build up process! We spent the six weeks leading up to the show in residence at the Hortus, in communion (and sometimes conflict) with our botanical counterparts.
ALL HANDS ON DECK
October 2022
In October, as the clock started ticking faster, our team gathered steam and expanded to 16 people. We were lucky enough to partner with the Amsterdam Hogeschool’s Minor in Immersive Environments program. We worked with four incredibly talented students - Mo Ghadour, Nik Hoogeboom, Pinelopi Korozi, and Stefano Dooijes - who helped us immensely in building up and running the installation. We also brought brilliant musician & sound designer Timon Persoon on board to bring the experience alive. And sculpture artist Iris Woutera also assisted us with custom-made pieces for our bioluminescent algae room. We ran some first light and sound tests in the greenhouse, allowing us to make final decisions on equipment purchases.
DETAILING THE EXHIBITION DESIGN
September 2022
We spent September moving from conceptual to concrete: making decisions on the route through the greenhouse, the color of lights, and preliminary placements of other equipment. We got to make our first expensive bulk order of tech equipment, whereas we had kept our budget extremely tight during the R&D and concepting phases. We also had a breakthrough idea: using a narrative color palette to bring people from human to plant perspective over the course of the three rooms. Plants “see” and “hear” in 3 colors: blue, red, and purple, while humans thrive in a warm yellow-orange. Thus, we moved from orange to red to purple. We used the color blue as a throughline color, representing plant signaling and interactive moments.
LETTING THE GREENHOUSE LEAD
August 2022
We had originally conceived of The Plant As Present journey as having four modules or phases: learning about plants, learning with plants, learning from plants, and learning as plants. But the more times we walked around the Hortus, the more it hit us: the Three-Climate Greenhouse has three rooms. Trying to split the journey into four modules would be to work against the location. So we decided to combine modules 3 & 4, giving visitors the ability to both have a direct interaction with a specific plant and experience being part of a wider web in the last room. This also led us to flip the journey to start in the Tropics, where we had expected to start it in the Subtropics. From then on, every decision we made was meant to work with the greenhouse and its one-of-a-kind plant species.
BACK TO BASICS… AND BIOLUMINESCENCE
July 2022
Our exhibition highlighted how plants and humans both use the basic signaling language of electrical potentials to communicate. We knew we needed to make this key point in a special way. On the recommendation of our advisor, Tom van Teunenbroek, we did a deep dive into bioluminescent algae. And we were not disappointed: these single-celled organisms, from whom we diverged evolutionarily 700 million years ago, still share this basic language. They demonstrate electrical potentials with beautiful simplicity: when stimulated, they fire an EP that activates this blue light producing enzyme, luciferase. We allowed our human visitors to witness this gorgeous phenomenon in a direct, intimate way. They could carefully stir algae aquariums and watch as they erupted in brilliant blue sparkles.
DEMO DAY: SH*T GETS REAL
June 2022
We sought to include our audience as much as possible at every stage of our process — both in the creation itself and in the wider discussion of the human relationship with nature. To this end, we hosted an Open Studio Day in June, where visitors could interact with our installation prototypes. This first public-facing moment allowed us to gather valuable feedback, but also served to drive home the reality of this massive undertaking. It spurred us to take our work to the next level and scale up our team in order to deliver for Hortus By Night in December.
DIVING INTO DEV MODE
May 2022
With our core team in place, we held our first PIP intensive work weekends in May. These sessions allowed us to set time aside from our busy schedules (all of us were working other jobs in addition to the project) to come together and focus on the biggest nuts to crack from narrative, tech, and artistic perspectives. We spent significant time getting to know a new type of EEG headset, the Muse, that would be feasible for thousands of visitors to use without assistance. We also started working out which sensors and controllers to use in our various modules. Most importantly, we established the team relationships that would carry us through the exhibition’s longest nights.
GETTING THE TEAM TOGETHER
April 2022
The first thing that became clear to us after the Hortus By Night commission was that we were going to need help, and a lot of it. We set off to build a team — especially those combining tech expertise with an affinity for our mission — to join us in bringing the project to fruition. Taffy Boudewijns, Nico Krul, and Nausicaa Karasmanoglou joined us at this stage, and we were happy to see their enthusiasm about both the project story and its planned execution.
HEADLINING AT THE HORTUS
February 2022
Our collective first reached out to Amsterdam’s Hortus Botanicus as a potential collaborator in June 2021. By the end of 2021, we had settled on the Hortus organization as a potential educational partner or host for our Demo Days, but didn’t dream they would be able to host our planned 10-day immersive installation in their already densely packed greenhouses. Imagine our surprise when new production manager Stephanie Drontmann called us up to meet in Februrary 2022 and, inspired by our story, not only offered to install our exhibition, but asked us to headline their annual 3-week Hortus By Night event attended by 10-15k visitors! We knew we had our work cut out for us, but we couldn’t turn down the opportunity to reach such a massive audience. And so the scale-up of our production from a one-room journey in a blackbox to a three-room immersive journey through a massive greenhouse began!
SUPPORT FOR THE PRODUCTION
October 2021
Our team was thrilled about the idea of bringing The Plant Is Present (PIP) to life for an actual audience. But we couldn’t continue to spend time and energy on it without moving from an R&D level budget to a production level one. We needed a destination and a sense of support. So we got to work creating a video of our work on BPI, our plan for PIP, and our wider convivial environmentalist vision. We had calls with a plethora of advisors from various funds in The Netherlands, trying to discern which of them could co-finance our independent collective’s project and how we could best align with their organizational objectives. And finally, we put pen to paper to write numerous grant proposals with great detail. We visualized our four-module narrative journey that would meet visitors where they were at: allowing humans to pass from knowing little-to-nothing about plants, to understanding how they communicate, to connecting with and imagining as them. Finally, we would invite visitors to become ambassadors of convivial environmentalism themselves. We applied for funding from Stimuleringsfonds’ Digital Culture Scheme and from Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst. After a few months wait, we heard back in October 2021: we got the funding!
A PROTOTYPE & A PLAN
June 2021
By June 2021, we had both a newly anointed Otherwise Collective and a working prototype of the Brain-Plant Interface, in which a human could have a meaningful interaction with a plant via their brainwaves. As great as it felt to have a working piece of creative technology, it was a far cry from an art piece. We wanted our piece to move people on a deep level, to lift them into a new vision of their reciprocity with and responsibility to the living world. We decided on a four-module narrative journey for our participants: learning 1) about, 2) with, 3) from, and 4) as plants. First, we would make plants’ many invisible communication languages visible, then we would zoom in on our shared language of electrical potentials, third, we would enable humans to use this shared language to interact with a plant in a gift exchange of blue light and oxygen, and finally, we would allow them to experience the 20+ independent senses of plants by mapping them onto our measly five. We also gave the work a new name that both indicated the shift from science & tech to art and also implicated both the plant and human visitor as protagonists in a multi species performance. We called it The Plant Is Present.
THE BIRTH OF OTHERWISE COLLECTIVE
May 2021
Somewhere in the process of developing BPI, we realized the project had the potential to grow into something emotionally and artistically compelling. We knew we wanted to bring a full production to life, but we needed a name to band together our mycelially expanding team of friends: Fernanda Gonzales Morales joined to advise on dramaturgy, Teresa Santos joined to run our project comms, and Jelten Beekhuis joined to think from a user experience design perspective. We settled on one word that embodies our vision: Otherwise. How can we live together with the living world otherwise? Practice environmentalism otherwise? Build community otherwise? Imagine what it means to be human otherwise? See otherness itself otherwise? And of course, how could we run an artistic collective otherwise? We decided that Otherwise Collective would serve as an umbrella or home for our various projects and activities. The only criteria would be 1) that one core member initiated the project and enlisted the assistance of at least one other member, and 2) that the project sat somewhere at the intersection of art, science, tech, and social & environmental activism. Our mission? To use this interdisciplinarity to spread better stories of our human relationship with our human and more-than-human worlds.
TRANSLATING SCIENCE TO STORY
March 2021
After educating ourselves about plant sentience and communication systems, we faced a new challenge: how could we carry a lay audience beyond rational knowledge and into the realm of intuitively felt connection? What would the experience of interacting with a plant through the BPI actually be like? Look like? Feel like? Would there be a necessary contribution from the human’s side? A leveling of sorts? Perhaps a gift exchange? We had learned from our advisors that plants produce EPs when they receive blue light — the most nourishing wavelength for their growth — and that this EP activates enhanced respiration, releasing a gift of life-sustaining oxygen in return. We had also learned that plant communication operates on a much slower timescale than ours, so we knew we needed our human participants to slow down and enter a state of attunement (or meditative attention) with their botanical counterparts. We asked humans to reach a threshold of attunement (we measured alpha brainwaves as a proxy) with the plant’s continuous slow wave potentials to unlock the gift of blue light and trigger the plant’s action potential. Finally, we decided to make the interaction a one-on-one experience to create intimacy and invite soft noticing.
SPROUTING THE PLANT-HUMAN QUARTERLY
January 2021
A few months into our R&D phase, we discovered a new outlet for our questions about the human relationship with the more-than-human world. Our research inspired Anna’s father, Neil Shepard, an accomplished poet and literary editor, to found the Plant-Human Quarterly magazine. PHQ would explore the myriad ways writers manifest their relationship to the botanical world – from heavily researched pieces, to keen observation, to less systematic, intuitive ways of knowing and interacting – that attempt to communicate across boundaries and possibly approach a plant’s-eye-view of the world. PHQ seemed to fill a niche in the literary community, immediately attracting contributions from nationally and internationally acclaimed eco-poets and writers. It built both a platform to exchange knowledge, an artistic hub to bring the botanical world into intimate view, and, above all, an effervescent community of writers all dedicated to fostering care for and belonging within our natural ecosystems.
ASSEMBLING AN ADVISORY COUNCIL
December 2020
The first thing we needed to do was learn. A lot. Our shared expertise covered many bases in science, art, design, technology, and communications, but we lacked a key field of knowledge: plant science and ecology — from both western and traditional perspectives. So we brought together a council of 10+ multidisciplinary advisors. We asked many questions. What do plants care about? What makes a plant fire an electrical potential — especially beneficial stimuli (much research on plant communication focuses on harmful stressors such as insect attacks or burning)? Is it ethical to send an EP from a human into a plant? Is understanding plant sentience in terms of EPs a lost cause as it imposes the colonial, mechanistic lens of western science on the living world? Is it still possible to use this simple fact not as an end in and of itself, but as a starting point for the artistic expression of plant lives? And what, after all, should we ask our human audiences to do with this newfound knowledge? Our advisors (link to page) generously gave us their time and resources, allowing the piece to deepen and develop to a level we could have never otherwise reached.
SEED FUNDING FOR BPI
November 2020
An astonishing fact ignited Anna’s scientific, artistic, and activist sensibilities: humans and plants both use electrical signaling as a basic means of communication. In other words, we share a language. Electrical potentials (EPs) send messages through human neurons, nerves, sensory organs, and muscles. Plants send these same EPs through leaves, roots, shoots, and out to extended mycelial networks to sense and respond to their changing environment. Could we use EPs to bridge the interspecies communication gap? Anna called her friends Fernando Diaz Smith (a creative technologist) and Skip Rosamilia (an evolutionary biologist and artist). Could we hack together the brain-computer interface of EEG (which records brainwaves) and the plant-computer interface of MESR (which records plant EPs) in an artistically stimulating and emotionally implicating manner? We wrote a proposal to Stimuleringsfonds for a small R&D grant… and (after some back-and-forth about the politics of plant sentience) we got it!
THE PLANT-HUMAN COMMUNICATION PROJECT
June 2020
In June 2020, spurred by a desire to unite her backgrounds in cognitive science, strategic communication, and art in service of climate action, Anna had an idea. She was tired of fear and guilt based environmentalist messages that left people anxious yet paralyzed. Instead, she sought out long-term psychological motivators: care and belonging. She envisioned a shift from seeing ourselves as apart from nature to a part of nature. Because you can’t exploit what you can’t see as “other.” Equally, she wanted humans to reimagine ourselves as co-conspirators of mutually beneficial relationships with the earth instead of fated villains. And what better way to create a sense of conviviality, intimacy, and reciprocity with another than through direct communication? The dream of facilitating plant-human communication was born.
