Boston Seaport is launching a series of free events exploring the technology behind their signature permanent plant music installation, Singing Trees.

Nature’s Networks: Integrating Biology and Circuitry

What can nature teach us as we develop new technology? Can studying simple organisms help us solve the complex technical problems of the future?

Through a panel discussion, we’ll explore how interdisciplinary collaborations between artists and scientists are uncovering new ways of seeing intelligence, design, and information processing. We’ll explore how emergent properties in nature offer a key to unlocking new approaches to designing and developing the technology of the future.

Panelist Bios

Sarah Grant is an American professor and media artist based in Berlin at the Weise7 studio.Her practice engages with the electromagnetic spectrum and computer networks as artistic material, social habitat, and political landscape. Central to her work is the cultivation of Physarum polycephalum, or slime mold, as a living data network with which she explores the parallels between nature's designs and network infrastructure. She also organizes the Radical Networks conference in New York and Berlin, a community event and arts festival for social just activations, critical investigations, and creative experiments in telecommunications.

Joe Patitucci is an artist fostering connection to nature through sound, breath and technology. He's best known for his pioneering work in plant music, a practice of data sonification where electrical impedance within plants is translated into sound. Joe has been sharing this work through sonic art installations at museums, festivals and public spaces around the world since 2012. As CEO of Data Garden, Joe is working to build a future where humans will have a real-time soundtrack to their lives generated from wearable data that is responsive to mood, tailored to taste and optimized for any activity.