The last couple of weeks in august, Spanish artists Maria Castellanos & Alberto Valverde attended a residency at OsloMet hosted through the FeLT project. The last few years the artist couple has been working on technical experimentation and speculative designs for revealing existential life in plants. One such artistic project is Symbiotic Interaction (2016-2017), where garments are embedded with plants connected to sensors, and the plants reacting to changing conditions trigger reactions through the sensors, forming a sort of hybrid communication system.

These themes were also carried through in the residency, where Castellanos and Valverde experimented with an EEG headset connected to plants via low-frequency electricity, and measuring oscillatory changes between the two – forming a sort of human-plant communication. This furthers Castellanos artistic focus on hybridizations between cyborgs and wearables as a paradigm for the expansion of human sensory capabilities. They also held a lecture and collaborated with students.

Read more at www.mariacastellanos.net