During my research for my master thesis, I got some nice book recommendations about plants, nature, art and environment.
Natural artworks
These books provide a good overview how plants are used in Fine Arts over the last 100 years. Furthermore, it addresses and describes the environmental impacts of these design and art approaches. Pretty useful for an art history overview.
- [Bartel2001] Bartelsheim, Sabine. Pflanzenkunstwerke: Lebende Pflanzen in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts. Schreiber, 2001
- [Nemitz2000] Nemitz, Barbara. trans plant. Living Vegetation in Contemporary Art. Hatje Cantz, 2000
- [KastnerWallis2010] Kastner, Jeffrey; Wallis, Brian. Land and Environmental Art. Phaidon Press, 2010
- [WiMaMe2010] Witzgall, Susanne; Matzner, Florian; Meder, Iris. (Re)Designing Nature - Aktuelle Positionen der Naturgestaltung in Kunst und Landschaftsarchitektur. Hatje Cantz, 2010
- [Haeusler2015] Häusler, Minh. The Fusion of Flora and Art. Hirmer, 2015
- [Ost2015] Ost, Daniel. Der Meister der Blumenkunst. Elisabeth Sandmann Verlag, 2015
- [Wagener] Wagener, Klaus. Architektur und Pflanze: Interior design with plants. Verlag Eugen Ulmer, 2012
- Phaidon editors (2016). Plant: Exploring the Botanical World. Phaidon, 2016.
Categories: Design, english, Generative Art, Interaction, Plants, Programming, Technologie Tags: art, books, Design, inspiration, Interaction, Programming, research
My old blog post about visualizing data with plants was a summary of related artworks. But for my master thesis, I had to apply a theoretical analysis method. The result is supposed to be a more (scientific) valuable evaluation of visualization techniques with plants. Here is the first version of it.
Nowadays information becomes more pervasive and crucial in a knowledge-based society [1]. Therefore it is important for a society to develop an easy access to communicate meaning and functionality of information [2]. The easiest information access exists in our natural everyday physical environment. Public Screens attempt to address this task. Unfortunately, current public screens hold several disadvantages for our public environment. They need a dedicated flat surface, illuminating their surrounded environments, and address only the visual sense. Furthermore, people often associate public screens with advertisement and pay less attention to them [2]. Therefore, it is rational to investigate information displays beyond the traditional screen-based visualizations. Plants are one of these objects, which are omnipresent in our daily physical environment. For this reason, data sculptures with plants might be an alternative approach to solve the problems of public screens and reach wide audiences. Read more...
The previous chapter "Can plants be music instruments" explored the possibilities of Biosensing with plants. Partially, it reveals some approaches how to translate plant perceptions into electronic signals (e.g. Pulsum Plantae). Movement and locomotion are always connected with perception [Ingensiep2001, p.303; Chamovitz2013, pp. 15] . The perception signal and the movement abilities of a living organism define how the movement will be performed. This interaction has an explosive power in philosophy. Read more...
During my research on Human Plant Interfaces I figured out music and sound is a very often used expression for this kind of interaction. As far as I know John Lifton and Richard Lowenberg are one of the first artists that used plants for creating a soundscape. Their installation "Green Music", created for the much discussed movie "The Secret Life of Plants" (movie), uses the approach of bio sensing and converts the signals to synthesized sounds. The visitors can interact with the plants via touch for changing the pitch level of a sound. Read more...
Im ersten Teil der Making-Of Serie habe ich die Randbedingungen des Projektes vorgestellt und unser Verfahren mit Hilfe von MockUps die Struktur und den Inhalt unserer App zu definieren. In diesem Beitrag geht es um die visuelle Gestaltung, sprich das Grafik Design unserer Ap. Ein weiteres Thema sind die Ergebnisse unserer kleinen Feldstudie mit Freunden.
3. Eine Art Mischung von Corporate Design und Screen Design
Die Erstellung eines visuellen Gesicht war weniger ein technisches und gestalterisches Problem, es war eher ein Budgetproblem. An dieser Stelle mußten wir einen großen Spagat zwischen unseren Ansprüchen und den stark begrenzten Mitteln machen. Read more...
A small summary of my Twitter messages from February 2013- June 2013:
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Categories: Design, english, Games, Generative Art, Interaction, mobile, Programming, Technologie Tags: art, books, cool stuff, Design, flash, Games, inspiration, Interaction, interface design, physical computing, Programming, tools, tutorials, video, web
One week ago I published a blog post about links and places for Physical Computing in Germany. Today I decided to do the same for plant-based stuff. Hopefully, I get more organized in the future and maybe helpful for some others, too. Please feel free to add some others resources as comment. ThX!
DIY BIO (ART) Community
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In relation of my masterthesis and my interests in location-based mobile apps I read the book "The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces" by William H. Whyte. The book is quite old and the first edition was published around 1980. My research focus was in particular in exploring how people behave in urban environments WITHOUT mobile communication technology. I am digital native, so I have no real idea how the world was before mobiles, walkmans and Game Boys. The book delivers a really good insight how people meet and behave in small urban places (plazas and small parks). Furthermore, it describes the vital elements of these plazas. How they correlate to each other and how to design them. The target groups of this book are more or less architects, city planners and landscape architects. But even for urban activists and street artists the book has some value. The elements of small urban spaces haven't changed much since 1980. Almost each element has his own chapter:
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In my previous post I presented a text collage about the basics of botany. In this blog post I created again a text collage about the subdisciplines of botany for Interface Designer. In my opinion there only four really interesting subdisciplines: Plant perception, plant defense against herbivory, Ethnobotany, and Horticulture. Each subdiscipline has a short description (text collage from wikipedia) what it does and a comment of mine. In the comment I give an argument why I think this topic is important for a deeper research. So here it goes:
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As a teenager, I spent too much time on skates, and I did not get teacher message why I should spent time for education. For this reason, my knowledge of biology - especially of plants - is so fucking minor. However, sometimes you got fucked, and then you have to kick your ass by yourself. Still, I am a little lazy m***f***r so the result is more or less a text collage of wikipedia articles. Here it goes:
Definition of plants
Plants, focus is on green plants (Viridiplantae in Latin), are living organisms of the kingdom Plantae including such multicellular groups as flowering plants, conifers, ferns and mosses, as well as, depending on definition, the green algae, but not red or brown seaweeds like kelp, nor fungi or bacteria.
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