Botanicus Interacticus (2012) – Studio NAND [DE]

Can a plant become an interface? Studio NAND’s Botanicus Interacticus a new form of human/plant interaction.

By using a visual illu­sion achieved by placing a two-way mirror in front of the display, inter­active and gener­ative graphics augment living plants and dynam­ic­ally change in response to the user inter­ac­tion with a living plant. The custom soft­ware enables to set specific anchor points on splines matching the shape of the plant. The particles move from this spline creating an aurora like impres­sion. A range of real and arti­fi­cial plants such as bamboo, orchid, cactus and snake plant were explored, where each plant presented its unique inter­active and visual character. Exhibited at the Siggraph 2012 Botanicus Interacticus commu­nic­ates a new capa­citive sensing tech­no­logy called Touché invented by Ivan Poupyrev / Disney Research in collab­or­a­tion with Jonas Loh / Studio NAND, Philipp Schoessler and Munehiko Sato.

At Coded Matter(s) #7: Extended Senses, Botanicus Interacticus will be present as an installation and Jonas Loh of Studio NAND will do an artist talk via livestream.

Jonas Loh is co-founder and designer at Studio NAND, a studio for research based design exploring interactions between society, science and technology. As part of the staff at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts he is responsible for establishing a new postgraduate programme at the intersection of art, science and technology. He graduated of the Design Interactions MA course at the Royal College of Art, his work has been recognised internationally through various exhibitions and publications including the MoMA New York, the Venice Biennale, Wired, V2, and the Siggraph Emerging Technologies exhibition.