I’ve been noticing some strange social/nature experiments recently.. it doesn’t quite constitute a trend yet but people are really exploring the use of nature and the environment in relation to our dependence on social media.. to varying degrees of success I think. First up, I heard about this:

Photo from this Wired article.

This is Meat Eater. (I don’t really understand the name…) It’s an australian experiment where this unknowing little plant was hooked up to a computermabob and was watered automatically every time it got a new fan or wall comment on Facebook. Now, let’s put aside the fact for one that this plant even had a fan page, and listen to this; it died. Yep, the plant was killed for having TOO MANY friends. It drowned in it’s own bloated sense of hollow popularity. It’s since been replaced 3 times, and people keep loving it so it keeps dying. Have you ever heard of anything so sad and amusing in equal measure? I’m not really sure if this was the point of the experiment in the first place, but it certainly makes you think. Wired wrote “The installation explores the emotions, connections and responses involved with using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and the idea of over-engagement with online interaction.”I think this over-engagement is becoming a common theme, and it’s an original way of exploring this notion, but what is it trying to say? That yes, we are over engaged? Ok, probably. Is facebook going to kill us? Not literally, but it’s definitely destroying our sense of real-life friendships. We are as connected, as popular and well ‘liked’ as we’ve ever been and yet loneliness for professional people in their 20s is at an all time high. (Read October issue of Elle – really great article in there about social loneliness).

Creator Bashkim Isai describes the green-thumbed artistic experiment as “a desire to reestablish the connection between human beings and plants”. I think this is possibly a more valid reason, albeit a bit vague; in our increasingly technology focussed, city-dwelling lives, more of us would probably rather kill an hour on facebook rather than in the park. I then found something which highlights this lack of connection between humans and plants much better, something which, as an experiment, is far more useful than poor Meat Eater:

Pics from Creativeapplications.net

This, is the talking, tweeting tree. “Initiated by the EOS Magazine and created by Happiness Brussels, A 100 year old tree, living on the edge of Brussels, was hooked up to a fine dust meter, ozone meter, light meter, weatherstation, webcam and microphone. This equipment constantly measures the tree’s living circumstances. And translates this information into human language via custom MaxMSP software patch. Follow the life of the talking tree via Twitter, Flickr, Soundcloud and friend it on Facebook.”

What? You may ask. I know. But what I love about this little tree is (firstly, no-one’s killing it) but it’s tweets and posts are so innately human-like. We’re constantly being told about the dangers of pollution in cities, carbon, global warming, but mainly with statistics, targets and years. We need to reconnect with nature; not so much literally like with Meat Eater, but as a stream of information we understand; we already get tweets, we get fanpages, this tells us what’s going on with this tree and why:

“Busy doing osmosis to collect some of this tasty rain”
“Me and my friends are doing overtime filtering fine dust out of the air”
“This surface ozone reduces the growth of my young tree friends”
“Breakfast for today: CO2, diesel fumes and some Nox”
“Not a single car around today. This brings back memories.”

I love it. So much. This ace little 100 year old tree is battling all the crap in the air we throw at it, just like all the other city trees, and it just gets on with it. If it weren’t for these trees, we’d all be choking in CO2 and Diesel apparently. It doesn’t get much more connected than this. I follow it on twitter and when I get a little tweet like that, it’s nice. Go on the Talking Tree’s site, it really is great. ‘I’m angry!’ it says. Aren’t we all, tree. Aren’t we all.

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