Ke Huang, Li Zhang
2025
Keywords:
Installation Art, Interaction Design,
Multi-Species Ethnography, Eco-Design,
Bio-HCI,Parametric Design
Based on the ecological characteristics and dynamic physiological properties of ferns, Full of Life constructs an interactive framework with a triadic relationship of “nature-technology-human”. The work treats plants as autonomous multi-species actors, revealing their non-symbolic state of existence in the process of human observation and intervention. The series of installations combines sensing systems and dynamic feedback mechanisms, using plant physiological data and ecological parameters as triggering sources, and generating embodied scale mechanical movements, visual representations and behavioral responses through algorithmic translation, thus constructing a dynamic semantic system with non-human life at its core. The work aims to explore the ethical boundaries of the objectification of non-human life, and reflect on the limitations of traditional interface design that overemphasizes anthropocentricity, proposing a more microscopic, delayed, and asymmetrical form of ecological interaction.
By integrating environmental sensors with plant physiological state monitoring (e.g., conductivity, surface tension, etc.), changes between the plant and the environment are captured to form a real-time data stream that provides a source of data for the dynamics of the device.
The lsystem code is compiled in turtle graphic in python to simulate the Barnley fern fractal, generating the graphic by controlling the parameters of layers, angles, complexity, etc., and finally connecting the key points in it to generate the planar shape is selected.
The display presents a sense of distributed jungle, with one installation unit growing on each individual “stone”, reinforcing the naturalness of the space and the logic of the scattered display, and suggesting the lush proliferation of ferns along the edges, in the crevices and in the blind corners.