Now that lots of people are going hightech, it’s high time for plants to do so too. Brazilian artist Ivan Henriques’ interactive “Biomachine” explores new channels of communication among human beings, living organisms and machines. It transforms a tropical plant into a sensor. When an installation visitor touches the leaves of this Homalomena, a flowering plant of the Araceae (Arum) family, the entire plant registers this stimulus and transmits an electrical signal to an attached machine that proceeds to go into motion.

“Kazamidori“ is a weathervane for the Internet age. “Kaza“ (wind) “mi“ (watch) “dori“ (bird) is a Japanese expression for a weathervane. People of former days observed the natural behaviour of birds, which have a habit of looking towards the direction of wind, and this behaviour was incorporated in the design of weathervane. “Kazamidori“ is a device to indicate the social wind of interests on the Internet. It works by using the social energy of web accesses to Ars Electronica. When somebody visits the Ars Electronica website, “Kazamidori“ turns to point in the direction of the visitor. For example, if somebody visits from Tokyo, “Kazamidori“ will point east.)

For about two decades, printers have offered computer users a convenient way to print texts and photos. But for a while now, special devices allow to make three-dimensional objects made of plastic, metal, gypsum and even concrete with a printer. First, you use special 3D software to design a digital object on the computer. Then all you have to do is print it!

Theo Jansen first studied physics. Since 1990, he’s been working with yellow plastic tubing, which he uses to construct skeleton-like creatures that lumber along the beach. Jansen considers himself the creator of a new life form that’s nourished solely by the wind and constantly undergoes a sort of evolution. These Strandbeester move with the wind, recognize obstacles with their feelers, and dig into the sand when a storm threatens. Theo Jansen has made it his mission in life to endow his creatures with resistance to diverse forces of nature so they’ll someday be able to survive without him and lumber independently along the world’s beaches.

People transfer systems from the physical to virtual space. But what happens if this process is reversed? Aerosol is an experiment, which investigates exactly this by using a particle simulation. The fascinating thing about such a particle system is the emergent, unpredictable phenomena. A taut fabric surface is formed into a continually changing landscape by using a grid of 16 servomotors that is attached to the fabric. Due to gravitation, small metal balls placed on top of the fabric are set in motion.

Groups and loners

If you watch the balls for a while, you will notice how the balls display a variety of behavior patterns. There are loners that constantly race over the fabric, never coming to rest, and groups of balls that move more slowly and only separate when the fabric landscape suddenly creates a hill.

The opposite of data storage is data destruction. How close these two are to one another is graphically and amusingly illustrated by your unerasable text. The processual chain commences when a festivalgoer sends an SMS to the installation’s cell phone, and it’s forwarded to a computer.

Message Grave

The computer’s job is to automatically format the text and send it to a printer, which prints it out in DIN A6 format and forwards it, in turn, to a file shredder, where it briefly lies atop a pile of its previously shredded predecessors before it too is cut to ribbons.