What is it about?
Natura Machina: Teenage Meadow symbiotically combines plants and robotics in a harmonious relationship as part of a long-term goal of creating art that is simultaneously a new life form that can exist in nature. The work consists of silicone rubber elastomer, air pumps, sensors, and reindeer moss lichen. It inflates and deflates rhythmically like the movement of breathing. Similar to a teenager’s nature, it will react to a stranger’s presence, especially when touched.
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Why is it important?
The 21st century will challenge pre-existing distinctions between nature and technology. How might the boundary between biology and technology begin to blur? Can we create a platform that is mutually beneficial for both robot and living things? The work evokes viewers to think ecologically, and seeks to enhance the environmental sensibility of the society.
Perspectives
Natura Machina: Teenage Meadow is an interactive pneumatic sculpture that embraces elements of the natural world and the human form. As a mound of green reindeer moss lichen that swells and contracts like a breathing lung through hidden, robotically turned gears, this work explores the interplay of interior versus exterior spaces relating to the body and nature. Singular and concrete meaning-distinctions—machine, plants, people— dissolve along a single plane; triggered by the presence, and deactivated in the viewer’s absence, Natura Machina: Teenage Meadow highlights the context structuring compositions so that our role becomes nature’s role for the body. We are such intimate moments existing as one.
Kuan Ju Wu
The University of Tokyo
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Natura Machina, June 2019, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3325480.3329169.
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