Raised On YouTube
Have you ever spent too much time watching YouTube videos? Don’t waste your YouTube hours, recycle them at http://raisedonyoutube.com. Raised On YouTube is an ecology game connecting the cultural and the natural ecology across the Internet. People watch a live feed of plants being grown only with the projected light of algorithmically curated YouTube videos. You can submit YouTube videos and have them analyzed right in your browser. If you submit the highest scoring video you can win prizes made from the plants.
If you could spare a few minutes and paste a YouTube video address into the game it will help the ecology. The plants will do better under the light of the more photosynthetic videos. Can we crowd-source the discovery of the web’s most photosynthetic video? The longer you leave your browser window open with the video analysis running, the higher our chances of success. Once your video analysis finishes, unscored videos will be analyzed one by one right in your browser. You are doing this ecology a huge favor by lending your CPU cycles while increasing your chances of winning. The fickle players that close the page or stop analysis before their video completes can never attain the true spoils of this contest. So please, keep that window open, and if not for me then at least for the Armenian cucumber (among others).
Join me, and together we will find the best video for plants. From the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to the contemporary green walls, plants have fascinated us. We enjoy rooting for plants—they make us happy. When the time comes, the vegetables, raised to maturity by YouTube, will be circulated into the supply of food for people to eat and relish. And then, who knows, maybe some will return to the Internet to post a better video.
Video Grow Light Video Update
The grow light is getting close to exhibition-ready state. Here is a short video update with direct sound followed by sound recorded in-situ. The veggies are pretty happy right now so I hope they like the air quality in the galleries. It would be nice if more people came to see them and brought their CO2 excretions! Veggies love that carbon dioxide, Mmm-hmm.
The exhibition will happen in Syracuse and New York City. The Syracuse exhibition will run from April 4 through May 12, 2013 during normal SUArt Galleries hours: Tuesday through Sunday 11:00 – 4:30, and Thursday evenings until 8:00pm. The opening reception will be held on Thursday, April 4th from 5:00 to 7:00pm.
The New York City exhibition will happen at 25CPW Gallery in Manhattan, May 22nd through May 26th between noon and 8pm. The opening reception is Thursday, May 23rd 6-8pm.
Video Grow Light 2
People have cultivated plants and have enjoyed plant spectatorship for centuries. From the hanging gardens of Egypt to the potted plants of today: they all required peopleʼs care and management. People continue to get to know plants better: we want to know how plants work and live. Ethnobotany opens the door for us to wrap our minds around the unparalleled influence plants have had on us humans: everything from food, to building material, to medicine is derived from plants.
New evidence shows that plants have evolved a vast array of systems to coexist with mobile creatures: by looking at their adaptations ranging from secretion of poisons to subtle chemical plant-to-plant communication we catch a glimpse of their awareness. Historically, our consciousness has been heavily influenced by plant cultivation and pharmacology.
At this point in our human development however, our impact on plants is so incredibly great that our pollution is a power that rivals the forces of nature. Humans, it turns out, were never really apart from nature but are instead incredibly linked with it through all our activities. What can our culture do for plants in return for all they’ve helped us do? Can we turn cultural waste into fertilizer?
Video Grow Light
Iʼve been researching radical ecology design as a strategy for making art. While creating a living ecosystem for my Toiletponics public installation I created a grow light for the vegetables growing in the sculpture.
Other people have created many types of grow lights before. But all the available grow lights are static. Time-lapse photography already showed us that many plants follow the sun across the sky over the course of the day. To make plants happier under ʻunnaturalʼ light, I decided to create dynamic lighting conditions for growing plants. YouTube—with 48 hours of new video uploaded every minute—is a rich source of dynamic visual content organized in a folksonomy held together by cultural links.
I created a software filter that picks YouTube videos with the best color temperatures for plants. I am projecting the algorithmically curated video onto plants to make them grow. The project celebrates the aesthetic nexus of natural and the cultural ecologies. The photo above is of the grow system in action. This work will result in a physical installation and more photos coming soon.
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