tele-present wind
10 comments
·January 24, 2025albert_e
Good experiment - felt a little underwhelming in current avatar.
The motion appears jerky and unnatural -- as they are being forced to move by the mechanism at the bottom versus a natural setting that has the lower stems fixed in place and orientation while the tops sway.
Also when you have a large number of these stalks in nature we often see them sway in "waves" as smal gusts of wind blows over them in one direction causing sometimes visible ripples along the top 'surface'.
Also, who is to say if the sensor is capturing the wind/movement at source faithfully and rest of the mechanism is reproducing it well.
albumen
Nice. The noise of the motors makes it feel artificial – which is of course it is, and likely part of the artistic intention, the divorce from nature. A different mood could be induced by piping the synced wind sound into the gallery too; the motion might also appear more fluid.
dowager_dan99
it is loud, but actually sounds like a reproduction of what you hear in a field, like the seeds rattling or pods brushing against other stalks, depending on what type of plants
nxobject
Depressingly enough, I would pay good money for a miniaturized version to put in my office/workspace – or some simulacra of the weather outside on plants etc. Imagine astroturf with flowers rippling with the winds.
roughly
I really enjoy David’s art, and I’m always happy to see it posted here - I think he does a great job of meshing the mechanical and the natural with enough of a dose of the absurd that I always find myself smiling at his work. I really love his plant bots - there’s some interesting research on plant “intelligence” and signaling that he’s gesturing at that lead me to really want to try to expand some of those projects.
3zra
More wind-related art (including Bowen): https://winds.report/art.html
ge96
Don't they have flex sensor harvesting ideas, take a bunch of those plant em somewhere provide data like ocean buoys.
triyambakam
Glad to see the origin of this. I saw this on YouTube refitted with "you're seeing the wind on Mars".
taneq
That's actually really cool. :D And here I was assuming it was about farting over the internet. :P
It's interesting that even this gives me an uncanny valley feeling, something about the fact that the motion of the stalk is "bottom-up" rather than "top-down" and that all of the stalks are trying to move in unison rather than wind kind of gently cascading over the institution.
I imagine the piece was supposed to be haunting in a completely different way -- so the idea would be that you'd be embedded in a space which is experiencing a "real" wind that you can't yourself feel on your skin, and so you'd feel like you took a step outside of reality. In that sense this would be an exhibit that a video probably can't do justice to? But I think the uncanny valley thing still sells it pretty well.