ELECTRONIC FLORA

Through the artwork Electronic Flora the duo Lerin/Hystad engages with plants firmly rooted in their environment. Although plants are sessile beings, they continuously explore their surroundings, interconnected through various internal and external networks. Lerin/Hystad records electrical data from these plants, which, through sonification, is transformed into sound. The plants themselves dictate the tones, melodies, and rhythms in the music. But plants are entangled in multiple other organisms and when the duo places their sensors on the leaves and for a moment captures the electrical activity within the plant, they are not solely capturing the plant but all the other threads in the ecological web where the plant finds itself entwined. Additionally, Bettina Hystad also the studies these plants through detailed graphite drawings.

“Hystad’s drawings, unfolding over an extensive period of time, never aim to beautify or idealize the plant. Rather than aiming to produce a perfect holotype, they embrace imperfection to foreground the distinctiveness of each plant as an individual, never disguising or omitting what science might consider flaws. It is in fact in the tear or tarnished leaf and the faded bloom that an indissoluble relationship between plant-environment-animals-fungi-elements is inscribed.” - Giovanni Aloi