Title: Waiting for the Light
Artist(s): Taavi Suisalu
Source: Neural Magazine
Sense(s): visual
Issue(s): data, bioart
Waiting for the Light is an installation by the artist Taavi Suisalu that integrates ideas of data and connectivity, with bioart.
This installation places plants in protected ‘Wardian’ cases , where they are free from pollution or predation.
The plants are supplied by light that comes from them being connected to the internet via mobile broadband. 1 Therefore, the light comes ultimately from submarine fibre optic cables. As the artist explains ‘This network carries threads of light as thin as tenth of human hair while being as existential to technological societies as the sun is for the plants. We are hanging by a thread while the artificial sun rays plunge through the oceans and light up our faces via bright screens’. 2 The lights that help the plants to grow are triggered by bots, as any device connected to the internet becomes a visibile entity, capable of interacting with such bots. Therefore ‘each plant then becomes an object of interest to these robots whose communicative acts, streams of light, once passed the floors of oceans, are lit back into our environment as bursts of growth light, giving them an agenda they are unaware of.’3
This project is of interest in how it links together the often dematerialised aspect of data communications, that is, thousands of kilometres of underwater cable, with the materiality of biological and ecological growth. Therefore, it invokes in the viewer a connected space of data communication and the living world.