The authors discuss their contributions to the 2015 Balance-Unbalance conference goals, bringing together McMullen_Winkler’s Soybots artwork and Zuiker’s Connected Gardening partnership with a local Phoenix elementary school. This collaborative effort balanced art, plants and technology for alternative learning experiences about future natures.

To understand, critique and shape the impact of machines that can see in ways exceeding human capabilities, humans may need to learn to see like machines, to understand their abstractions and categorizations. The installation 20/X explores visuality, representation and epistemology in the age of intelligent seeing machines. This project is a collaboration between artists and biomedical researchers in an attempt to bring science, technology and the arts together to create an opportunity for public dialogue around an invention that will soon permeate the designed world.

Gardens express ideas and social relations; some are sites where art and technology produce material realities, construct social narratives and visualize politics. Soybots: Mobile Micro-Gardens unite code, robotics and soybean plants (robotanics) to create a speculative responsive installation that suggests questions about climate, place and agriculture implicated in contemporary practices and values. Soybots utilize light sensors to track sunlight intensity or to locate LED grow lights. As self-pollinating organisms in combination with a light-seeking mobile robotic platform, soybean plants metaphorically address the continually evolving interdependence between humans and cultivated crops, as well as the underlying political nature of photosynthesis.