This Open Hertzlab explores the fascinating relationship between living things and human touch by utilizing their natural conductivity.
Visitors are invited to interact with living plants, triggering digital responses through Calliope and Arduino microcontrollers. This hands-on experience blends nature, technology, and art, revealing the unseen electrical properties of plants in real time.
Plants conduct small electrical signals, which can be detected when touched. Our plant circuit is based on a capacitive touch sensor: when the plant is touched, the capacitance changes due to the presence of the human body, and this change is detected by the circuit.
I created an installation using flowers placed in water that directly influence the visuals displayed on a screen. When a visitor touches and holds the plants, the image gradually becomes clear. As soon as contact is released, the image returns to a blurred state, modulated by noise.
The changing capacitance of the flowers when touched is detected by the Arduino, and this data is translated into real-time visual transformations in TouchDesigner.
Participants are encouraged to experiment with their own code. With guidance from the Hertzlab team, visitors can modify the interaction logic and adjust how the plant’s responses manifest in TouchDesigner.
This open-ended engagement fosters creativity, learning, and personal expression through interactive media — turning plants into collaborators rather than passive objects.