Plant Band

2017

Relational Ecologies is a project designed to simulate musical interactions between human and non-human entities. 

Under this project, Plant Band explores the outsourcing of creative performance, connecting plant physiology to specifically designed bespoke robotic instruments that select plants “play” for the gallery audience. The flora players in the band come into possession of a fictional creativity facilitated by these instruments, calling into question notions of the ‘other’ and the interpersonal relationships between human beings and the natural world. The imitation of musical performance undertaken by the personified natural life is an effort to mimic human creative ingenuity in a way that critically shifts plant forms from being possessive of objecthood into personhood. Through this suspension of disbelief, Plant Band imagines in plant life an immediacy of self, a present autonomy, to counter the unchallenged static perception of flora and the role it plays in natural ecologies. By accelerating the time scale of plant communication forward into the instantaneous in the context of music making, the artist envisages Plant Band to challenge connotations of plants as static ornamental displays, and facilitate a relational dialogue that is at once both humorous and potentially meaningful. 

This work was showcased at PICA as part of Hatched 2018.

Photos: Carly Lynch