Qi Hu

The soil nurtures humans and plants, and we are all root beings.  Gradually our connection has degraded and humans began to think of plants as near-inanimate creatures. Our tendency to equate behaviour with movement keeps us from appreciating the vitality and sensitivity of plants, and the different temporal rhythms that they exist in. A separation appears, the integrity of plants is disrespected; and intervention, harm and domestication follow.

This is a moving image installation with two parts, showing that similarities also exist between two seemingly vastly disparate species - humans and plants. The journey begins with the similar skin morphology of the two species generated by the neural network and delves into a discussion of the respective rhythms of time that exist within and outside of human consciousness. The aim is for people to find our 'plant heritage’ - to mediate on our perception and our relationship to plant life.

Inspired by Isomorphology I started by observing the morphology of plants, to the point where I scanned the skin of plants with a microscope and found that they all had a similar textural structure to “fuzz, flecks and wrinkles” in the human context.

I trained a generative adversarial network model to connect and blur the colour differences between the humans and the plants' skin, multiply similar textures. Finally they are made into soft sculptures to simulate the limbs of people and plants. This is an attempt to reconnect people and plants.

Special credit for helping me with the soft sculpture:

Jiangmeiling Xu, Baowen Mai

Our tendency to equate behaviour with movement keeps us from appreciating what plants can sense and do; plants are always still in people's sight.

Here I divide the temporal rhythm into two parts, inside and outside human consciousness, and also the differences and similarities in temporality between humans and plants: the 'still' plant in our consciousness versus the human being in motion at all times (the difference). The slower growth time of hair and nails as well as plants outside of our consciousness(the similarity). They are projected on the surfaces of two ordinary clocks and two clocks shaped around the "root" (the original human form attached to the umbilical cord / the root of the plant).

The different numbers of hands rotating on the clock face visualize how our innate sensorial apparatus perceives the images that are projected on the corresponding clock face - You don't immediately notice the movement of the minute hand and the hour hand, unless you drag the video progress bar back and forth, just as you don't always notice the rhythm of 'growth time' outside of your consciousness.

These slow rhythms similar to plant temporality are also exist in our bodies, so please try to understand that the slowness of plants just means slow - it doesn't mean that they are inanimate or insensitive.

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