BioTactics
From UoWiki
That Rhododendron is a Spy! some Bio-Tactical Information Systems
Recently the Danish Bio-Tech company Aresa announced they had genetically modified a plant to change colour when certain chemical compounds are (in abundance) present in the soil. Few commentators have recognised that this invention has enriched the arsenal of spy-o-graphy with an entire different realm of sensor-devices. Architecture, technology, social sciences, statistics, software, animals; all of them have been made useful for purposes of control in the past. But now, because apparently we can't trust ourselves, we also need transgenic plants to keep an eye on us. In this particular case the goal is lofty enough, as the plant can help us locate lost land-mines.
Gencrops, aka Frankenfood, may scare you, genetically modified forests may leave you cold, but who can resist, as Eduardo Kac rightly understood, a glow-in-the-dark bunny. The 2.0 version of your favourite pet might very well contain a gene for self-luminance, 'borrowed' from a fish roaming the deepsea. In this sense, a landmine-aware Thale Cress, is just another gentech niche. Instead of allowing the little rascals to waste their petty lives vegetating, technology finally found a way to make useless plants useful.
Douglas Irving Repetto wants us to feel what it must be like for a plant to be dragged into human functionality, with his 2002 installation "How to annoy a plant". In a closed environment, plant-recognition software monitors a plant growing towards one of two grow-lamps, when a certain threshold is reached, one lamp switches off and the other switches on, forcing the plant to suddenly grow towards somewhere else. This never ending disturbance causes the plant to be 'annoyed'. This is just a joke, as Repetto's accompanying explanation shows, but a most serious one. Doug Easterly's installation Spore 1.1 is another serious joke; a rubber plant living inside a small computer, whose life is determined by the stock-rate of the company providing the plant. If the company does well, the plant gets water; if the company falters, the plant suffers with it.
Surveillance on humans by monitoring plants is a somewhat similar application of this bio-tactical principle. Consider smart dust; thousands of tiny sensors with limited capabilities overlay a territory, collaboratively harvesting data. The territory can be a glacier, a forest or just a tree. Over a wireless connection, collected data is send to a computer, here it's saved to be accessed locally by researchers, but it can also be automatically published as real-time report on a website. Every tree could have its own bio-activity blog and a XML-feed to accompany it. A logger could be caught in the act half a planet away.
http://swamp.nu/work/spore/spore.html http://www.aresa.dk/ http://www.music.columbia.edu/~douglas/portfolio/howtoannoyaplant/
(This was written at 12 December 2004, a month from now this list might already seem prehistoric, a year from now it certainly will)
