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augmENT? (By Rob Mason)

“Tangible interfaces: treating the whole of physical space around the user as part of a human-computer interface (HCI) by employing physical objects as carriers of information.” – Lev Manovich on one element of the technologically “augmented space.”

“Once populated biotechnological interfaces can be deployed on a large scale to transform the landscape into a vast kinesthetic garden. Habitation of the landscape is based on one’s own movement and tactile relationships with the space. Pressure sensitive turfed areas respond to footsteps, long grasses chime to be stroked, artificial scents are diffused through the air at the tap of a leaf whilst vast arrays of LED’s change colour in response to your movement.” – Conceptual architect Guido Macioci

Guido Macioci’s Augmented Ecologies

Often in ancient creation myths our world comes into existence via sound. The makers in the Finnish Kalevala sang this earth into being; the Biblical God said “Let there be light” and we were illuminated whole. Suppose then that we lived in an environment where every plant rang out at the brush of a hand, and from their sound emerged new colours and shapes drawn vast down the sides of skyscrapers. Such are the ambitions of Macioci, who has managed to outfit plants with sophisticated (yet commercially available) digital sensor arrays which generate vibrant images on nearby LED screens. This preliminary rig is far short of the “kinesthetic garden” he envisions, but it demonstrates the possibility of a newly holistic integration of the organic and the technological.

I’ve written before in this blog about the immanence of nature (specifically here); there is no such thing as unnatural because we are always within nature. This argument is typically advanced in response to concerns that we verge upon becoming to detached from our traditional arboreal environs. In this case, however, we see the possibility to bridge the digital divide with leaf and vine. It’s a stark contrast to the glaring fluorescent horror of the New York Prada store described by Manovich as the vanguard of augmented spaces, as well as the neo-Luddite character of many leading “white cube” art installations. We might even take Macioci’s project as taking to one logical extreme Manovich’s prediction that the 2000s would be “about the physical – that is, physical space filled with electronic and visual information.” Regardless of whether we can accept the conceptual “naturalness” of the advert-laden hyper-reality Manovich discusses, there is something inherently grounded and physical about plants that we sense at the reptilian stem of our brains. The verdant is expected and accepted innately.

Of course, the cynics out there among you (and I’m a card-carrying member) will likely notice right away that, for all of this project’s logical inevitability in a realm of pure theory, it is being conducted within the sheltering aegis of a university rather than the “real” world. Augmented spaces in reality have been appropriated, promoted and brokered by business, and their goal has been mostly to encourage and expand the toothless vampirism that is consumer culture. Leaves don’t sell products, but they do cost money to be rooted into circuit boards, to have their vines jacked into I/O ports. But Macioci’s plan, for all its lack of obvious “use” anticipates this; his outline emphasizes the availability and relative cheapness of all the technology involved, two key factors to any significant grassroots change.

After all, if leaves can learn to sing and draw from computers, perhaps they can teach their plastic partners a thing or two about growing organically.

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