Helene Steiner, Paul Johns, Asta Roseway, Chris Quirk, Sidhant Gupta, Jonathan Lester
Nature has many languages. Project Florence takes advantage of the sensibility of plants to different light frequencies and uses it to trigger electrical responses by a plant and compares the similarities between plant signals and natural language processes. It approaches plants as reactive living matter which generates new perceptions towards how we interface with our natural environment. This creates a rudimentary conversation with our natural environment. In this system, the user first attempts to communicate with or influence the plant through modulated natural language. Their inputs are analyzed for sentiment and semantic content. The resulting signals are used to modulate a light source that projects onto the plant. During this, the chemical and electrical signals are measured. The resulting responses from the plant are transformations of the input, driven by linguistic trees as well as lexical paraphrases. Project Florence can be a mediator between the natural environment and our technological world.
Microsoft Research; Helene Steiner, Paul Johns, Asta Roseway, Chris Quirk, Sidhant Gupta, Jonathan Lester.
This project is presented in the framework of the European Digital Art and Science Network and co-funded by the Creative Europe program of the European Union.
