Akousmaflore Sensitive and interactive musical plants from scenocosme

The interactive garden
Akousmaflore is an interactive installation, a small garden composed of living musical plants, which react to human gestures and to gentle contact. Each plant reacts in a different way to contact by producing a specific sound. The plant «language» or song occurs through touch and the close proximity of the spectator. Our invisible electrostatic aura acts on the plant branches and encourages them to react. The plants sing when the audience is touching or stroking lightly them. A plant concert is created.

Alliance between nature and digital technology
In their artwork, the artists Scenocosme create hybrids between plants and digital technology. Plants are natural sensors and are sensitive to various energy flows. Digital technologies permit us to establish a relationship between plants and sound. We display the effects of random data flow and plant interaction. The data is modified as the spectator meanders around and touches the installation, resulting in a random musical universe. Audience gestures and movements generate sound effects and changes in the texture of the sound.

Approach : invisible design
Our body continually produces an electrical aura, which cannot be felt. This phenomenon exists in the environment immediately surrounding us. In our research, the «design of the invisible», our approach is to animate that which we cannot detect. Mixing reality with imagination, we propose a sensory experience that encourages us to think about our relationship with other living things and with energy. Indoor plants can have an ambiguous existence that swings between decorative object and living being. It is said that «inanimate objects» can react when they receive human attention. Through Akousmaflore, plants let us know about their existence by a scream, a melody or an acoustical vibration.

Akousmaflore (interactive plants technology since 2007)d

Akousmaflore is based on the interactive plants technology developed, produced and realized by the both artists Scenocosme in 2007. Akousmaflore was exhibited in many digital art centers and festivals around the world.

Akousmaflore is a garden composed of real and living interactive plants. In this sensitive garden, plants react to the human presence, touch and gesture. Each plant reacts to different set of touch and proximities by complex sound composition.

In this tactile artwork with sensitive nature, the artists Scenocosme design evolutives interactions with living plants. Scenocosme uses the plants like sensors. They place wire near the roots of the plant in the soil, in symbiosis with it. With this interactive technology, plants become instrumented, and its senses are augmented.
The sensing approach used in this technology treats plants and human as a biological interface. Plants and humans become living sensors. Differents approach with the plants allow to produce many kind of interactions with sounds.
A large range of sensitive interactions are possible. People can touch the stem or the leaves. Plants react to the proximity and also the intensity of the touch. Each plant has a voice and a specific interactive character which are chosen according to it form and texture of leaves. Their sensing technology allows them to play with these characteristics in the treatment of the sound. By this way, Scenocosme designs interactive garden artworks where the plants are used as sensing capacitive technology and interface.

By giving a voice to plants, Akousmaflore offers the possibility to respond and engage the audience. Akousmaflore encourages each people to enter and interact inside a surrounding physical environment. This artwork engages physically the people inside a social space and experience. Visitors can stay a long time inside the artwork and share this extraordinary experience with the other one.

Several interactive artworks of Scenocosme create dramaturgic space those different approaches of the postural communication generate sonorous retroaction of plants (Akousmaflore, Phonofolium), water (Fluides, Dilution), stones (Kymapetra), the interaction by physical contact between two or several persons brings to light and puts in sound these sensations (Lights Contacts).

Presentation (pdf)

Photos (high Definition) (jpg)

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Akousmaflore - Reportages TV
Arte TV - Festival VIA à Maubeuge - Interview de Véronique Godé / OREVO, RTS TV : Kulturna zakladnica (Cultural Treasury) : Kibla (Maribor - SLOVENIE), FR3 Région : Festival 38ème Rugissant (Grenoble - FR) , Monbled TV : Festival Artrock (St Brieuc - FR), M6 : Maison Salvan (Toulouse - FR)