Nervous Plant is an interactive, sculptural installation in which the viewer’s movements elicit textual and kinetic reactions from a seemingly ordinary potted plant. The Nervous Plant rests atop a wooden laser-cut box, which has openings for an IR proximity sensor and power inputs. Hidden inside the box, a stepper motor driven by an Arduino rotates a circular platform that the potted plant sits on, causing it to shake. To its side, a monitor with anxiety-ridden text phrases changes based on the presence (or lack thereof) of human participants.

 

Without any viewers in the interaction space, the Nervous Plant jerks and twitches, causing its leaves to rustle curiously. Walking toward the plant, viewers are met with messages urging them to move closer. As viewers move closer, the plant eventually grows still, as if calmed by the human presence. When viewers try to leave the plant, accusations of abandonment and negligence are triggered on the screen in an attempt to elicit feelings of guilt and sympathy.

 

Nervous Plant presents a situation that asks viewers to actively perform an attunement to and care for an everyday houseplant. Viewers move, and are moved by, the plant and its concerns. While the piece has a comical undertone, recent studies are suggesting that plants have memories - that they can learn and remember. All around us, plants we often consider “inanimate” are instead continuously moving, changing, adapting, remembering. Could practicing a more sensitive engagement to our material environments change the ways we perceive and treat them? At stake in Nervous Plant is an awareness of the liveliness of nonhuman agents – even at the level of a houseplant.