‘I wanted to see if the plants could contribute something,” says Hito Steyerl, sitting in the office of her Berlin gallery. “I feel it’s a good idea to take humans out of the equation a bit.”
Described as a post-internet artist – someone who uses the tools of digital technology to tackle broader social issues beyond web culture –Steyerl is credited as the creator of one of the works in Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis, a new group show at London’s Hayward Gallery. But in a way the true creative force behind the piece, called Green Screen, isn’t her at all. It’s not even human. On the back of a giant LED screen, Steyerl has grown a vertical garden with ferns and hops. The plants generate bioelectrical signals, which are translated into sounds that have been paired with a rudimentary drum track. The results, which come warbling out of a pair of speakers, are fed into an AI engine that turns them into heavily pixelated animations of budding flowers.
