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PLANT SOCIOTARS

PROJECT CONCEPT

PROJECT CONCEPT...
Plants have become the focal point for this project because of their non-hierarchical quality; no plant is more important than another. We thought this could usurp the anthropocentric order, and forge new ways of social thinking in the digital age of the anthropocene. Because plants are exempt from social expectations and impositions, we decided plants would be the best medium, or vessel, to use to explore the chosen social themes in a speculative design methodology. This aligns with Donna Harraway’s ideology of “making kin” with other species we share our planet with; “we require each other in unexpected collaborations, in hot compost piles”. Plant Sociotars is an experiment in a ‘hot compost pile’ - an attempt to find a revised form of digital existence using plant ideologies as a conceptual framework. 
Figure 1 - Diagram - Plants ideologies as Mediators of digital interactions
Figure 2 - Diagram - Plants ideologies as Mediators of digital interactions in a network
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Plants have desirable properties that cannot be found in the digital space. These include the ability to purify the air through Phytoremediation. “They make our surroundings more pleasant, and they make us feel calmer” and promote wellbeing. Plants also display intelligent systems of nutrient exchange that they carry out symbiotically: in forests, the mycelium and the trees are connected through a mycorrhizal network, “which connects individual plants together to transfer water, nitrogen, carbon and other minerals”.
Opening at Camden Arts Centre in London in September 2020, exhibition The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and The Cosmic Tree brings together people, plants, and the culture and thinking within them, “engaging with various cultures and wisdom-traditions to reappraise the importance of plants to life on this planet”. From remote times to today, the associations between plants and people have become more diverse. If we put the properties of plants together with the social problems that arise in the online world, a new approach to the problem may emerge - using the properties of biological plants as a metaphor to combat the social problems of the digital space.
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