Neither Here Nor There
2023
with Harpreet Sareen
plants, electronics, AI
Multispecies Constitution Workshop, March 2023
The Berggruen Institute, Los Angeles
Creativity and Cognition, 2023
New School New Books, 2025
Neither Here Nor There is a speculative installation exploring human perception of the natural world from the perspective of four plants. Probing the act of communication as well as the indeterminate gap between what is deemed human and non-human, the installation highlights the complex role that technology plays in our current understanding of the human. Standing in large pots around a meeting table, plants engage in a free roaming discussion about what they think it means to be human and about planetary politics.
Key questions and terms are fed into GPT-3 (AI-based natural language text generator) and played as plant sounds. As the plants converse in this manner, no aspect of their conversation is intuitively legible to the viewer. Viewers are invited to use a decoding app on their cell phone that translates these plant sounds. In avoiding an obvious mode of human-centric representation, the installation places the viewer in unknown territory, asking them to consider what intelligence, communication, and cognition mean beyond the human perspective.
At the same time, this work pokes fun at our continued fascination with discussing the non-human and the impossibly biased human perspective implicit in that act., the human observer is the subject of wild speculation.
In highlighting the increasing way that technology is used to make sense of the human condition, Neither Here, Nor There speculates on what hybrid beings emerge when one form of non-human intelligence collaborates with another. Artificial and natural merge creating an alien presence which is neither here nor there – at once removed from human understanding and inextricably linked.
Cellphone in hand, tuned to plant sounds, the viewer is left wondering about the subject of discussion among the plants, and responses from the plants to their own questions.
Software flow of ultrasonic text data from one plant to another using GPT-3 generated content.
Electrical system diagram of a (mis)communicative plant module.