The IndaPlant Project: An Act of Trans-Species Giving

The IndaPlant Project: An Act of Trans-Species Giving. This is the first test run for the first ever floraborg.

Our first IndaPlant, a robotic support that allows houseplants to freely seek sunlight and water, is up and running. The work debuted this week at the Secret Life of Plants Symposium at Princeton University, will debut as a solo show at CAMAC this month and will be presented at the 2013 International Symposium on Electronic Art in three weeks. If you are in Sydney, please join us! http://www.isea2013.org.

In advance of the opening at CAMAC, I posted a rough video short of the project titled IndaPlant Project: An Act of Trans-Species Giving, on vimeo: https://vimeo.com/65444659 last week. The video describes the making of the first IndaPlant, shows the initial floraborg test run and describes the multiple stages of the project.

Once the video was posted, Christopher Mims wrote a lovely article about the project on Quartz http://qz.com/82541/robotic-exoskeleton-turns-houseplants-into-drones/. That story was apparently picked up by the Daily Mail in the UK which ran it as their lead science and technology story (with a great picture of a wilted potted plant) on Monday, May 13th, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2321914/Plant-bot-worlds-robot-turns-household-plants-light-seeking-drones.html.

Just now, as I was about to write this post, I did a fast Google search on the project and first found, on French YouTube, part of the video with no voice over and some sort of ominous dance music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A9g_k7KAkc. It had two hundred hits (!) If any of you know French–please let me know what the write up says.

I then proceeded to find on Google five pages of posts/articles and blogs about the project in many languages. So, if any of you can read any of these posts, let me know what you think. Cheers, Eliz

In Spanish: http://mrcitech.blogspot.fr/2013/05/robot-indaplant-mantiene-plantas-cerca.html

http://es.gizmodo.com/indaplant-el-vehiculo-autonomo-arduino-para-ficus-con-500417824

http://www.chw.net/2013/05/conoce-a-indaplant-el-dispositivo-que-convierte-las-plantas-en-robots/

http://www.pcdemano.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article

http://www.frontera.info/EdicionEnLinea/Notas/CienciayTecnologia/09052013/701422-Mantiene-robot-a-plantas-cerca-de-luz-solar.aspx

http://www.robotikka.com/13920/robot-mantiene-plantas-cerca-de-la-luz-del-sol/

In French: http://fr.500gadgets.com/page/meet-indaplant-device-that-turns-plants-into-robots.html

In English: http://nexttruth.com/?p=9526

http://www.extremetech.com/author/jplafke

http://news.discovery.com/tech/robotics/exoskeleton-helps-plant-find-sun-and-water-130514.htm

Chinese/English: http://biweekly.isvoc.com/category/indaplant

http://tech.sina.com.cn/d/2013-05-15/10098341846.shtml

http://post.discovery.tom.com/s/060009316086.html

http://firefox.huanqiu.com/tech/discovery/2013-05/3937696.html

http://scitech.people.com.cn/BIG5/n/2013/0516/c1007-21504013.html

http://www.cunbox.com/news/kj/kxts/2013/0516/49324.html

http://news.cnyes.com/Content/20130515/KH7W0XEN9NY5A.shtml?c=headline_sitehead