Behold a plant equipped with a machete
The artist attached electrical sensors to the plant, and its electrical activity triggers unpredictable swings of a glisteningly sharp weapon
Link to the original video here: https://www.dwbowen.com/plant-machete
Thoughts from me in this blog post (item #4): https://clivethompson.medium.com/contranyms-song-sharks-and-a-plant-that-swings-a-machete-cf510c89b059
@clive gah, this is reminding me that I need to water my plants 😬
I had a very strong reaction to this and it's been fascinating to try to work out why; I find the machete a strange projection of a very human approach to "defense" - the use of a weapon. Defenses in nature that plants employ, as you described in your post, are more of a symbiotic relationship with the environment around them; this feels like an escalated version of that in an incredibly disappointingly anthropomorphized way; the moral objection I have is to the fact that humans default to using weapons (exclusive to humans, created by us and used only by us) for our form of survival, instead of a more natural symbiotic relationship with the world around us.
But wow, what a thought experiment.
Yes, this is a really good point! The gut-punch of this artwork is the anachronism of a barbarically human weapon linked to the activity of a plant
(It just occurred to me now that the machete's use as a lethal intra-human weapon is a second-order use; it was originally designed for use with ... hacking through *plants*. So, an additional layer in the art here)
It only occurred to me just as I was writing that reply!
Clive Thompson
Zan McQuade