"Can the Plants Hear You?" 1998

Birmingham Botanical Gardens - IKON Gallery commission

A sound based interactive installation in the Birmingham Botanical Gardens which explored perceptions of scientific evidence. Working as the Lewin Collins Foundation I created two "educational" workstations which suggested that plants might respond directly to human activity such as music. My intention was to present people with something that looked scientific but which they would quickly 'see through' and perhaps cause them to question how easily they accept scientific authority. In practice every single visitor asked, said they believed the "experiments". These visitors included a party of Botanists from another institution! Some months later I was contacted by an agricultural college and asked if the Lewin Collins Foundation would be prepared to restage the experiments for their students - it was hard to know whether the caller was more embarrassed or disappointed when I explained that the plants had not in fact responded to the music he had played to them when he visited.