I Like to Think of a Cybernetic Forest Filled With Pines and Electronics: Mergings of Plant and Technology in Contemporary Art

Intertwining what can be seen as environment and technology, contemporary art often has a pioneering role in articulating new paradigms. Interlinking ecocritical claims with techno-utopian imaginations, artworks of this genre conceptualize ecosystems as sentient objects of investigation and as autonomous, agential counterparts to a human audience. This article explores how medial imaginations of environmental connectedness might arise or can be imagined in artistic practices through the entanglement of technology and plants or forest ecosystems. In looking at three different artistic case studies, the article investigates how plant bodies and forest ecosystems as well as technological devices are conceptualized, arranged, and interlinked on a material level and explores the epistemologies and aesthetic traditions that the artworks relate to. Through deploying sensing technologies, imaging techniques, sensors, and recording devices, the three artistic case studies discussed in this article – “Perimeter Pfynwald” (Marcus Maeder, 2019), “Terra0” (Terra0, 2016), and “Variants” (Pierre Huyghe, 2022) – construct ecosystems as entities, explore logics of cybernetics and computation, and in doing so shape our imaginaries of our more-than-human environment.