As part of the Whangarei Fringe Festival, we opened our studio to conduct community-based research for the culmination of the BioSignals Project and as a way to feed our Strange Intelligences Lab Project.
From the 7th to the 12th, over 200 people came individually, as families, or in larger groups to talk through and learn about artificial and organic plant intelligence.
Key themes for the studio were raising people’s awareness of AI’s impact on them and their community, showing them the cool things happening in our region, exploring how collaboration can happen internationally without physically travelling from place to place, and expanding people’s consciousness to other types of entities, practices, and ideas.
Several people came in repeatedly to ask more questions, and several said it had been transformative as an experience.
A special Instagram Live on the 8th guided people through a process of sending signals into space – and culminated in sending actual signals using our Starnote IoT device.
Kim Vj’d plant signals into our Resilience Garden.
Six mini-workshops were conducted on various topics, and we had an interactive installation where we consulted Great A-EYE for its wisdom.
Throughout the workshop, we also generated Monkey-Flies and gave them away to support people in being guardians of their abodes and practices.
People also had the opportunity to add content and vj the plant signal visualisations, which signifies humans’ key role in manipulating plant ecology.
We will continue this research in various ways within our SI Lab in the coming months.
Key team members for BioSignals: Dr Maggie Buxton, Kim Newall, Jarred Taylor, Frederico D.A. de Sena Pereira, Daniël Vandersmissen.
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This experiment is part of the Strange Intelligences Lab
