Spore 1.1

In reading the texts regarding using plants for making artwork I was really surprised on the influence that ideas and artworks mention in them had in some more recent artworks. In particular one work that gain some notoriety not so long ago by the duo of SWAMP.

The work that I'm talking about is Spore 1.1

Spore 1.1 is a self-sustaining ecosystem for a rubber tree plant purchased at Home Depot. In this project, Home Depot is responsible for the plant in two ways: first, an unconditional guarantee to replace any plant they sell, for up to one year; second through an implied cybernetic contract. This second responsibility is the creative content for the work, where the economic health of Home Depot is transitioned through a series of physical computing techniques to a mechanism for controlling the watering of the rubber tree.

An onboard computer uses a Wi-Fi connection to access Home Depot stock quotes once per week, keeping a database of the week’s ending stock values. From the fluctuations in Home Depot stock, programs and circuitry connected to the rubber tree are controlled accordingly. If the company does well by showing stock growth, so does the plant - if the company suffers losses, Spore 1.1 does not get watered. If the plant should parish, due to poor stock performance, it is returned to the Home Depot and replaced with another-at no additional cost.

So the plant received more water if Home Depot's value in the market went up. Here then the life of the plant is regulated by the market and thus we can see how the market acts as a filter to regulate the propagation and survival of one species. Gesert affirms that: "Class-inflected taste exerts pressure on plant breeding, but economic pressures are much greater, at least in the United States. The marketplace is a filter that screens all of today's ornamental plants except for volunteers and the informal trades and gifts that escape commodification."

The project renders visible the relation between the plant and the multinational in real time over the internet, by doing this Hans Haacke's "real time systems" are addressed: "The new conceptual art... was more preoccupied with its mediation of and by the environment and seemed literally more expansive as suck... the new art was like an organism embedded within, and extending towards, the environment, with changes that took place in the object as a function of information introduced into its system".

In the end the rubber tree plant died. But not because it didn't had enough water:

"Home Depot’s stock ratings varied the whole time of the project. In November and December, however, Spore1.1 received water on 8 consecutive weeks. Its health seemed to steadily deteriorate after that, as its roots became rotted, and eventually died in January 2004. This was an unexpected result, as we assumed a weekly 1 minute watering would not kill the plant, rather only a lack of water would kill it. But it somehow seemed appropriate that the plant would die because of an overabundance of Home Depot stock gains".

http://swamp.nu/doug/bioFi_06.pdf