Abstract

Keywords: Ecological surveillance, Biosensing technology, Plant based intelligence, Environmental adaptation, Amazon rainforest, Speculative design.

This paper explores merging technology and biology into semi-living designs in order to rethink and advance current ecological surveillance tools. Drone technology combined with (the sensory capabilities of) living plants could provide our monitoring tools with plant based intelligence and more advanced ways of sensing ecological changes. Drones are currently designed to collect specific data through single-flight missions without longer-term interaction with the target location or non-human species. The paper speculates on the potential use of recent discoveries of the ways plants sense and interact with their environments as well as each other as part of the monitoring process. The paper presents and discusses a future design proposal The BIO_DRONE—an autonomous hybrid drone designed by merging the plant Boquila trifoliolata with a flying device. The resulting concept is a hybrid biosensing drone that aims to provide manifold data about the world’s most complex biome—the Amazon rainforest.

• Zane Cerpina is Oslo based artist, organizer and designer working within experimental new media. Zane currently works as creative manager at PNEK (Production Network for  Electronic Art, Norway), curator, producer at TEKS (Trondheim Electronic Arts Centre), editor and manager at EE: Experimental Emerging Art. Her writing and editorial work include the ongoing publication series: The PNEK FILES (2015-) and editorial work of the upcoming Book of Electronic Arts Norway. She has also written for Neural magazine. Zane is internationally active as a lecturer and presenter and has shown her work at venues such as: ISEA (Vancouver 2015, Hong Kong 2016, Manizales 2017), STRAND (Serbia 2016), LABVERDE (Brazil 2017), V2_ (Netherlands). Her extensive body of works include curating and producing Dangerous Futures Conference 2018; Oslo Flaneur Festival 2016 and The Anthropocene Cookbook (2016 -). She is also one of the curators and producers of The Temporary Library of Norwegian Media Art.

Full text (PDF) p.  44-49