Plant.play(mode='worlding')

Yoonji Lee, Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST)

Artwork Description:

Plant.play (mode='worlding'); is an installation in which a living plant becomes the agent that grows an autonomous digital ecosystem, reimagining biological-digital relations. Where digital environments follow human logic, this work asks: What if a plant’s biological rhythms became the infrastructure of a digital world—shaping how beings emerge, evolve, and inhabit without human control? The system begins as a plant-driven pet simulation game and expands into a shared web village where mature digital beings—grown through different plants cultivated worldwide—coexist. Bioelectrical signals and environmental conditions—light, temperature, humidity, and airflow—are sensed through custom electronics and translated into a computational genetic code that shapes virtual beings' temperament and appearance, giving rise to archetypes rooted in the plant’s materiality. In the village, plant-grown inhabitants weave a relational fabric through emergent interactions—sometimes forming cultures of creative collaboration, sometimes spiraling into chaotic friction. They might build snowmen and plant trees together, or set fires and entangle others in vines. This society does not upgrade toward optimization; it grows through the slow, messy accumulation of events, a living chronicle of a society negotiating its own conflicts and joys. This is an act of worlding—a mediated bridge between human interpretation and plant reality. We can read fragments of thoughts and history, yet this world is never fully translatable into human terms. That gap invites encounter with non-human agency thriving at its own pace. Ultimately, the work asks a post-digital question: When a life we cannot control grows a world we cannot fully comprehend, what new form of “We” becomes possible?

Project Collaborators:

Visual support was provided by Gurim Kim, including pixel art, photography, and videography. Supervisory support and guidance were provided by Chang Hee Lee.