What if we gave plants the agency to express themselves? Living organisms that, though we all know they're living, we often forget due to their inability to advocate for their own needs. This is the question Prof. Jonathan Rattner pitched me when I began my independent research with him about a year ago. The creation of a drawing machine that could visualize musical sounds synthesized by a plant's very own electrical signals.

For a while now, I had begun to transition away from pure STEM and instead experiment with more creative endeavors. The cinema and media arts department at Vanderbilt, provided me with the space to do so. Through various film projects, I got to meet a lot of the staff and students in the filed, and quickly realized how my engineering expertise could be applied in a completely new way.

Prof. Rattner brought me into his installation project, building a completely DIY drawing machine from scratch in order to interface with the work he had already been doing with his plants and musical synthesizers.

WORK IN PROGRESS

current status

This project page is currently being built. The work exists, but the final documentation is still being organized into a clearer write-up! Below are some of the things that will be eventually included.

additional resources

Listed below are the user manual for the scribe as well as the Github repositories with all the code and drawing models in case you want to take a look!

credits