Abstract

Keywords: Plant Blindness, Plant Intelligence, Botanical Illustration, Seeing Plants, Interactive Art

This paper describes the authors´ interest in raising awareness about plants. For around 30 years they have been creating media artworks that connect plants and humans, in an effort to create more attention towards the vegetal world. The paper starts with recent findings on plant intelligence and then provides a historic overview of plant illustration as a means to study and understand plants. The authors also describe their own fidings during botanical illustration and investigate how this knowledge can be used for media art connecting humans and plants.

• Christa Sommerer is an internationally renowned media artist, researcher and pioneer of interactive art. Currently she is a professor and head of the department for Interface Cultures at the University of Art and Design in Linz, Austria. She was a Guest Professor at CAFA Central Academy of Fine Arts Beijing, a guest professor at Tsukuba University Empowerment Informatics Department and an Obel Guest professor at Aalborg University, Denmark. Together with Laurent Mignonneau she has created around 30 interactive artworks, for which they received numerous awards such the 2012 Wu Guanzhong Art and Science Innovation Prize (for “Escape”) awarded by Ministry of Culture of the People’s Republic of China, the Golden Nica Prix Ars Electronica, the Ovation Award of the Interactive Media Festival Los Angeles, the Multi Media Award’95 of the Multimedia Association, Japan and the PRIZE 2008 – uni:invent Award by Ministry of Science and Research in Austria.
• Laurent Mignonneau, Interface Culture, University of Art and Design, Linz, Austria