instruction 1. The plants in the greenhouse are called "Kruidje-Roer-Me-Niet (Sensitive Plant)". They close their leaves when you touch them. 2. If you want to touch the plant, then hold up the square frame. This is the interface to steer the arm. 3. Steer the square frame, changing its angle and height, so that the arm moves back/forward/left/right/top/down. Make sure that you touch the plant gently. * If the leaves are already closed, then you have to wait until they recover from the last interaction. It takes about 20 minutes. * The more frequent you touch, the less active the plant will become. * The plant wakes up at 8:00AM, and goes to sleep at 8:00PM. When they are sleeping, please do not disturb them. * Please do not hit the plant. (images below are GIF animation)

In the summer of 2003, I made an installation "Kruidje-Roer-Me (Touch-Me-Gently)" for the exhibition "QI-KUNSTEILAND" held in Quarantaine-Inrichting area in Rotterdam. In this installation, the plant which reacts to an audience's touch is being used. It's called "Kruidje-Roer-Me-Niet" in Dutch, "Sensitive Plant" in English, and "Mimosa Pudica" in Latin. It closes its leaves once it's being touched, and opens them again after 20 minutes. As a part of my installation, many of them are being planted in the greenhouse. In the middle of the greenhouse, there hangs an arm made of cotton. It's connected to the square frame outside of the greenhouse with ropes. By moving this square frame left/right, up/down, forward/backward and rotating it, the audience can control the position of the artificial arm like a marionette. In short, this interface is a controller for the cotton-arm that is made for the audience in order to touch the plant.

There are two intentions behind this work.

(1) Integrating the behaviour of this plant in an interactive quality of the work.

This living organism is nothing more than a plant, but it responds to somebody's touch and gives a movement, like an animal. I wanted to bring my fascination to an artistic level in this work. It turned out to be very challenging for the audience to experience the qualities of the plant through the interface.

(2) Emphasizing on the interaction, by designing an interface which mediates plant and audience.

The cotton-arm is intended to be an extension of the audience's body. The audience seemed to have understood it and felt intimate enough; they did not step inside of the greenhouse to touch the plant with their hands, although they could if they wanted to do so.

This work was exhibited in the Rotterdam's exhibition in the nature area"QI-Kunsteiland" from June 7th till August 31th, 2003.

Maki Ueda