Initiator
Marcia Nancy Mauro-Flude
Collaborators
Kate Geck
Vvifi_PLANT: Garden of Forking paths
VV_Plant is a modular sensing device generated by lo fidelity wireless-capable microcontrollers solar-powered for off-the-grid operation, forming a bespoke Internet beacon to transmit and receive atmospheric data driven by solar power. Situating it in the local fauna of domestic backyard (sensors carefully attached to the trees, twigs, and leaves) this forms an infrastructure to transmit signal pulses between plant nodes appearing as a live feed on a web browser. The sensing device provides real time sensory data from its situated location so that one can monitor and optimise local ecological conditions. In a garden IR transmitters and receivers are carefully attached to plants, transmitting atmospheric updates. The prototype explores the materiality of networked systems, to demonstrate bio-geo-cultural parts of the co-constituent worlds that surrounds and forms living relationships, between matter, mineral and plant in which we dance in temporal ambiguity.
VV_Plant aesthetically explores and mediates networks of matter of varying scales and visibility. Future direction is that the devise can be replicated and form self-healing mesh networks that adapt to a range of bespoke geographic locations and ecological conditions and collating this data in a way that is driven by local solar protocol rather than a main energy grid.
Vvifi_PLANT: Garden of Forking paths is led by Nancy Mauro-Flude, School of Design, College of Design and Social Context, RMIT University. This ongoing project is a part of the Holistic Computing Aesthetic Network a group woh explores the explores sustainability of the internet through the aesthetic dimensions of infrastructure through which artists, technologists and theorists collaborate to address issues of alternative energy, wi-fi transmission, and the future tools that are situated and can be sustainably powered for off-the-grid operation.