In the Algorithm’s Eyes, “We Are Already Plants”

If you left a bunch of colorful, bouncy balls on a schoolyard, odds are that nearby children would pick them up and play with them. But what if you left those balls for a patch of cucumber plants—would they play too?

That is the question at the heart of Slovenian bio artist Špela Petrič’s 2020 experiment PL’AI (play), described in Getty Publications’ new book, Botanical Revolutions: How Plants Changed the Course of Art. Author Giovanni Aloi explores Petrič’s hypothesis that plants possess the capacity to partake in playful activities, much like humans and other animals.

To create PL’AI, Petrič worked with engineers to build an AI-powered robot that stood almost 10 feet tall. Like a marionettist, the machine dangled stainless steel threads affixed with colorful, bouncy balls. The robot’s sole purpose was to invite cucumber plants to play with it, and viewers of the work could observe how the plants responded.

How did Petrič, a trained scientist with a PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology, end up a bio artist—a creator who works with living beings? And what happened when the robot met the cucumbers? Speaking from Amsterdam, the artist reflected on her journey.

What was your relationship to plants as a child?

Špela Petrič: Interestingly, I have been ignorant of plants most of my life. I even remember making fun of botanists for their obsession with plants. The only plant that I really remember from childhood was a Mimosa pudica. When you touch it, it folds its leaves onto itself, sort of like a Venus flytrap, sensitive to touch, and the movement is rapid. This was the only plant that was interesting to me, because it behaved more like an animal.

In my 30s, I started asking myself why I was careless toward plants, when rationally, I know how essential they are for all life on earth. This was an interesting question to address also artistically—by then, I had left my work as a biologist because I was drawn to asking and exploring questions as opposed to proving hypotheses.

I began working in the emerging field of bio art, and ethics is a huge question there. We think a lot about human and animal rights, but few people think about plants in terms of ethics.

What questions were you asking when you began your project PL’AI?

Petrič: Before PL’AI, a lot of funding—mostly European Union funding—was going toward the new hot topic of AI. And in 2016, I read Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction, which confronts this algorithmic culture we live in and how algorithms recursively influence the conditions of our reality just because they exist. I also read Shoshana Zuboff’s Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. It all got me thinking: What is this humanness that we’re losing? I realized that this kind of humanness, this kind of consideration, is what has also been lacking in our relationship to plants.

Then it occurred to me that in the eyes of the algorithm, we are already plants. We’re all statistics. Plant-Machine was a series of three works where I explored what happened when I thought of myself as a plant or that plants and people could be easily substituted.

In Vegetariat: Work Zero, I connected plants to smartwatches, which reported their activity to mobile apps. The data went into prediction algorithms. In Institute for Inconspicuous Languages: Reading Lips, I attempted to learn what plants are saying by reading the stomata of an inch plant (Tradescantia zebrina) in the same way humans read lips.

PL’AI was the final work. With it, I wondered if plants would play, so I designed an experiment. Plants don’t really have arms, but they have elements that repeat. So, instead of a robot with arms, we created 36 bouncy balls, which dangle and are individually controlled. They can move up and down; the computer randomly chooses which ball to move at which points.

How did the cucumber plants react to the bouncy balls?

Petrič: They explored their environment and came into contact with the balls with their tendrils. Sometimes they grabbed on, and sometimes they grabbed on and then changed their mind. Other times they grabbed onto a ball, and the computer pulled it away from them. I have not observed them preferring a certain color of balls.

Was this play? Yes. Play is open-ended, not like a game with structure and rules and a clear goal. Play can be an activity that escapes that a little bit, like a child learning to use their limbs or discovering gravity.

We are evolutionarily conditioned to enjoy this type of play, because it allows us to understand what our bodies can do and how we relate to others of the same kind, negotiate social relations, the environments, and so forth.

If I were a plant, I would like an AI robot to be concerned with giving me joy. I don’t want it to improve me, extract from me, or use me to do something that is good for someone else—just play with me.

So, what I was going for was a little hopeful. I wanted to explore capacities that plants might have, almost out of spite as a way of resisting the reduction of plans to living material, that yes, it’s about pleasure. It’s very feminist.

Do you think plants feel joy?

Petrič: I choose to believe that they do, and science cannot necessarily disprove this claim. Plants have many capacities which we ordinarily don’t consider. For example, there are experiments that suggest plants hear the sound of running water—their roots will grow toward that, even though it’s not in contact with the roots. Plants also make sound. It’s still not known whether they listen to themselves or each other, but the environment—especially predators—responds to these sounds.

Plants are also electrified in a similar way to humans. While they don’t have a nervous system, they do have excitable cells—signals are transmitted along the body of the plants for communication between different parts. Just as we use electromyography to measure nerve and muscle function in humans, something similar can be done with plants.

However, when we observe the plant’s electrical activity through machines, we are looking at a very tiny slice of the plant being, as if we were relying on a smartwatch to understand a person. A watch might think a human is anxious because it’s active, but a human can be active because it’s creative, talking, singing, expending energy in other ways. It could mean anything.

Western ethics are based on a hierarchy of life: minerals, plants, animals, humans, God. When we debate what is correct, moral, or not, we often use ourselves as the yardstick. If you avoid eating animals out of concern for their pain, by that logic, eating plants is acceptable, but not animals.

But once you choose this sentience as the criterion for not wanting to inflict pain, you’re denying the understanding that you live based on or because of all the other organisms that have died, and that you too can become food.

Plants have taught me that you cannot know if it’s right or wrong using this type of hierarchical, human-based criteria. That said, I’m not against vegetarianism, and do believe we are overconsuming meat.

How else might we be underestimating plants?

Petrič: This is an interesting moment to bring in evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano—who poses the question, “Can plants learn?”—and go back to the Mimosa pudica I mentioned earlier.

Before her, Darwin himself noticed that when you shook the mimosa, it folded its leaves. But if you drove the mimosa around in a horse carriage, after a while, it would stop closing its leaves. It was like it learned that this kind of shaking was not posing a threat.

Monica did a similar experiment—she dropped a mimosa from 10 centimeters high, repeatedly, like training sessions. After a while, when the mimosa was dropped in the same way, it would not close its leaves. But when it got a different signal from the hand, it would close them.

So, the mimosa was specifically recognizing this type of impulse, which is crazy. Or, is it crazier if you’re questioning where its brain is? Plants are alive and have been around for longer than we have. They have had to navigate the environment with the changing climates, with all the predators and pests. It’s really not surprising that they have all these capacities—many of which we’re just starting to understand.