Epiphytic memory: Making with plants, the responsible use of technology, and speculations on a community biosemiotics

Epiphytic Memory is a step towards broadening our channels of communication between the built environment and biotic environments. The initial process of making might be called a cognitive assemblage - where the cognition of plants, myself, and technologies are all at play to produce the works. Responding to how plants make with one another, houses by plants for plants (epiphyte sites) are 3D-printed in clay. The prints become approximations of tree bodies living in the Catlins (the largest rain-forest on the East Coast of Aotearoa/New Zealand) by human technologies through the layered use of computer vision and additive manufacturing.

These bodies are sometimes reconfigured by a framework I developed where a plant's electrical signals control an algorithm that redistributes curvature across the models. The final models are placed at two sites in Ōtepoti/Dunedin where there is significant play between human architecture, infrastructure and the botanical world, within the elm trees of Anzac Avenue and beside the Ōwheo/Water of Leith in Ross Creek. Here they are interventions, with the hope of allowing plants their full autonomy in the work as they germinate and grow on the prints. This also functions as a scientific experiment. The trees of Anzac Avenue were the subject of a study in the late 90s attempting to correlate epiphytic lichen biodiversity with air-pollution levels. In this way, what will grow at these sites in the next 5-10 years may be correlated with this data, telling us something about the surrounding air and its dynamics. Urban epiphytes, mosses and lichens have been and are instrumental in telling us the dangers of air-pollution. The biodiversity of urban lichens, for example, has been shown to directly correlate with levels of air-pollutants, as well as lung cancer. Ultimately this will also bring this knowledge into a wider field. That is to allow for an emergent cross-species bio-semiotics in the public domain, encouraging channels of communication that are less restricted to human-human encounters.

• See images of Finn's work on Flickr

Keywords

epiphytic, built environment, biotic environment, plants, biodiversity, 3D printing

License

This abstract is publicly available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International.  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

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