Can a plant think? Once seen as passive and silent, plants are now emerging as protagonists in a new artistic movement that blurs the line between biology, technology, and imagination. This year’s RIXC Art Science Festival 2025 in Riga, themed “Plant Intelligence,” gathered artists and scientists exploring how plants sense, communicate, and even “decide.”
Image: PLANTS INTELLIGENCE RIXC Art Science Festival 2025. https://festival2025.rixc.org/
Behind this idea lies a growing field of plant neurobiology, revealing that plants respond to light, sound, and touch through electrical and chemical signals – an unseen network of perception and memory. Artists are transforming these discoveries into living installations that let us see and hear the secret language of leaves. In works like Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau’s “Interactive Plant Growing,” human touch translates into digital growth patterns, while projects at RIXC transform bio-electrical data from real plants into sound and light performances. Elsewhere, installations such as City of Plants reimagine urban life as a shared ecosystem between humans and vegetation.
These experiments do more than visualize science – they invite empathy. When a plant’s voltage pulse becomes music, or a leaf’s movement illuminates a gallery, the artwork becomes a dialogue between species. Viewers are no longer observers but participants in a cross-species exchange.
Image: Flowers – Inventors of Their Own Existence. Plants intelligence RIXC Art Science Festival 2025 https://festival2025.rixc.org/rasa-smite-raitis-smits/
For the biotechnology community, this artistic fascination with plant intelligence mirrors a broader cultural shift: from extraction to collaboration, from control to coexistence. As bio-sensing and living materials enter design and biotech research, art acts as a translator – turning complex biological systems into emotional, tangible experiences.
In listening to plants, bio-art teaches us to imagine intelligence beyond neurons and code. It suggests that the next frontier of innovation might not be artificial at all, but profoundly organic – a quiet, green mind reminding us that life itself is the most creative system of all.
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