Plants as creative partners

Photo credit: Margrete Lodahl Rolighed.

Last week we had the pleasure to chat with Raune Frankjaer about her work and new research project Growing CoDesign. 

Raune describes herself as a crazy plant-lady (bonus points from us 😜), artist and experimental academic who works in the intersection of art, technology and more-than-human (or posthuman) philosophy. 

In 2012, she came across plant signalling and was immediately absorbed by the idea of “listening” to plants and eventually involving them in design practice. Growing CoDesign is a one-year NOVA-funded research collaboration headed by Raune that aims to explore ways to combine creative practice with digital technologies to include nature into design processes. Through the use of novel sensing technologies, the current part of the project focuses on plants as creative partners. 

Raune explains that throughout her experiments with plant electrophysiology and the PhytlSigns device, plants use electrical signals to communicate information to such an extent that one could almost assign a personality to them. She argues that the power structure between her plants and herself has changed. In fact, she jokingly argues that one of her plants now won’t send her any significant signals before 11am - before the plant has its coffee and is fully awake. Others have been ranging from 'bored' and unresponsive to 'alert' and oversensitive, which makes working with them difficult. 

GrowingCoDesign offers a series of free workshops to get involved in creative partnerships with plants. Workshops are free; all that is required to join is time and dedication.

The next scheduled event takes place on 7th August 2021 from 11-16 at plukk in Aarhus. Applications for the event close on August 1st. 

For more information on Growing CoDesign and its workshops, click here.