Yu Gao

Speculative fiction is a catalyst for blurring the boundaries between reality and imagination, I have chosen this medium to begin rethinking and reconsidering the subjectivity of plants, through storytelling.

The protagonist of the novella, 'KZ', is an alien who learns about how humans treat plants through constant contact with plants and humans and tells the story in a diary and a video of scanned scenes. At the end of the novella, KZ tells us that he brings several artefacts (diaries, plant devices, videos, etc.) to the year 2022. In order to animate and materialise the story and world more vividly, I have restored these and present them here.

I hope that through the speculative reflections and conceptions of plants in these stories, the viewer is reminded of the hidden power that plants have in themselves. I hope this will disrupt the inert, instrumental way we treat plants, and inspire us to conceive of a way of caring for and reciprocating with plants differently. This links to our inseparable relationship with plants in the world; from the perspective of the long, slow, evolution of plants, humans may be nothing more than products of a plant world, and human life is even more insignificant and contingent.

Link: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1146016

Against the backdrop of a story in which human intervention and technological experimentation have caused ecological collapse, the natural order has been irreversibly disturbed, resulting in plants that can no longer survive in their native environment. The plant in the novel is thus a paradoxical but important character, a figure that is vulnerable, controlled, and at the same time has hidden more-than-human powers.

As in this physical installation, the plant in the container is grotesque and beautiful, a kind of 'disturbing hybrid', which reproduces the scene in the novella where the 'G-Company' struggles to maintain the vital signs of the real plant, whose body is pierced and filled with different tools as an object of study in an attempt to obtain more plants in exchange for money.

In the novella, the 'G-Company' is a group that profited from environmental extinction and grew to become the largest capitalist group of its age. I have used the physical installation to restore scenes and visually convey this sense of strangeness and tension to the audience, and to disrupt the nature/culture boundary by fusing 'natural' and 'technology' material together in one being.

Due to the scarcity of real plants, the 'G-Company' has instead created another form of plant: the virtual plant. They are cultivated as virtual currency and spread in a virtual world they have designed called "Green Island".In an era when real plants are given a high price, people can play 'G-Company' gambling machines on the island to obtain virtual plants and exchange their points for real plants. And taking advantage of human speculation, the 'G-Company' designed three gambling machines around virtual plants, prompting humans to gamble wildly for them, as another anthropocentric instrumental use of environmental objects. 

This VR device recreates part of the island, with which the viewer can view the scene and walk around it. In addition to this, later in the novella, the players on the island are cultivated like plants and eventually used as experiments, making the island more of a product of "intrigue" and "desire": people are constantly buying virtual seeds and gambling on them for profit, using their bodies for G Corp's experiments.