The interactive garden
Akousmaflore is 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 or warmth by producing a specific sound. The plant «language» or song occurs through touch and the close proximity of the spectator. Our invisible electrical 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 our artwork, we 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 and heat 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.
