Title: Floral Automaton
Artist: Thomas Grogan
Source: Creative Applications
Sense(s): visual, visceral
Issue(s): ‘smart’ sensing, ecosystem growth
This piece is a digital installation that works with ‘smart city’ data to trigger visual representations of flowers in bloom. The installation does this in real time, to visibilise in a creative way the environmental data available in ‘smart’ city contexts. In this way it is an important work for this project. The project works with various environmental parameters, such as CO2 levels, light, humidity and temperature. Only when the parameters are within correct levels do the digital flowers represented on screen bloom. For the artist ‘Floral Automaton explores how environments become programmable and are made to be operational through sensor technologies. It sits as a response to the current trends for environmental programmability and computational environments’.1