Enabling direct & meaningful interactions with plants
through our shared language of electrical potentials
Behind The Plant Is Present
Stepping into the world of plants is to enter a lively, ongoing conversation. These conversations feel invisible to most of us, but only because we’ve forgotten how to listen. With a little help, we can remember.
Plants are communicating all the time around us. They have 15-20 distinct senses (unlike our measly 5). And they use four main signaling “languages” - water, carbon, volatile chemicals and electrical potentials - to communicate about what they perceive, both within the individual plant and across whole ecosystem communities.
A Shared Language
Both plants and humans use electrical signals — called Action Potentials — as an internal communication system. We send them between our brains’ neurons and throughout our whole bodies, just as plants send them throughout their leaves, stems, roots, and even their fungal mycelial network below ground. Why not use this shared language to interact across species and close the gap between human and more-than-human worlds?
But in asking how to join in the “conversation” of plants, we need to ask what matters to them. Moreover, if we seek to make the dialogue a positive one – giving beneficial inputs instead of simply extracting outputs for our own benefit - we must ask what plants find rewarding. Much research on plant action potentials (APs) has focused on defense responses, in response to being attacked, burned, or drowned. But we there is also one positive input for which reliably produce an AP: blue light. Blue light is the color plants use most to grow, so it’s onset triggers a system-wide response. The AP quickly activates the plant’s metabolism and respiration processes, as if producing a call-to-action: “wake up, it’s time to grow!”
The Gift Exchange
At Whole, we’re able to use our brainwaves (our most prevalent EPs) to gift blue light to the plant across from us. All we need to do is pay it some attention, share our breath, and practice slowing our brainwaves to its slower timescale. By giving this gift to a plant, we also give a gift to ourselves. The plant’s increased respiration produces more oxygen for us to breathe… a mutually beneficial dialogue.
The Plant Is Present is a space for reflection and connection. We hope that through taking the time to come closer to an other, we also come closer to ourselves <3
OTHERWISE is an Amsterdam-based group of artists bridging art, science, and technology to spread more enabling stories of our relationship with our human and more-than-human worlds. We work from the premise that the current climate and ecological crisis is calling for a fundamental shift in perspective – a shift from seeing ourselves as apart from nature to seeing ourselves as a part of nature, and a shift from seeing ourselves as helpless spectators to seeing ourselves as powerful agents in (re)building mutually beneficial relationships with the Earth.