Carboflora

This virtual environment is populated by plants that echo the Earth’s flora from hundreds of millions of years ago, specifically, the plants of the Carboniferous period that now constitute coal fields. As is widely recognised, our age, aptly named “capitaloscene” by Donna Haraway, is detrimental to the environment and health of all living organisms. Use of fossil fuels has been repeatedly proven detrimental to the Earth as a whole, yet hope persists that if we completely end our use of fossil fuels, we might reverse some of the effects of global warming and try to restore some of the damage we created over the last two centuries of industrial progress.

Forests of the Carboniferous age consisted of many relatives of contemporary plants – conifers, horsetail, and ferns. Some of the plants, like the early relatives of ferns, could grow to forty meters high. Lepidodendron trees had bark that resembles scales. Fossils of this plant sparked the imagination of our ancestors and might even be responsible for the imaginary construction of dragons.

Although declining, coal is still widely used in industry, not only for direct energy production but also for numerous industrial applications and derivatives; it remains a significant source of carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere.

Carboflora environment is connected to tracking the quantities of harmful particles in the atmosphere. Its levels are reflected in the way plants inhabit the virtual system. Properties of virtual plants are connected to a database that tracks air quality in almost real time. More than 10,000 stations throughout the world constantly send data about various pollutants like PM2.5, PM10 (small and big particulate matter), O3 (Ozone), NO2 (Nitrogen dioxide), SO2 (Sulphur dioxide) and CO (Carbon monoxide), as well as the AQI (air quality index). Upon opening, the application chooses the closest physical location and maintains the various properties of plants according to the numbers being sent from the database. Plants as a sort of timeless ur-forms echo the past and possible future within which we might curb our polluting emissions.

All objects within Carboflora were homogenised through using the same uniform white material, just as are the physical objects within other installations of Sphere2, in order to bring forth several conceptual elements that constitute the platform “past-future tense of futurism” and “technological optimism” with references to ancient Greek gods of medicine, medical equipment, and biomimetic patterns of natural plants.

Five virtual trees are growing, depending on the values within each category of particles measured at a particular physical location. When the application is opened, the IP address should choose the nearest physical location provided by the World Air Quality Index database. There are five scripts for five separate categories of air pollutants. These scripts were assigned to separate three-dimensional objects. Their size is also recalculated in relation to the average daily amount of a particular pollutant. This script is invoked every hour. If there are more particles than average, the trees remain lower, and if there are fewer particles than average, the trees grow larger. A first person controller (FPC) with an attached camera is devised as an instance of a simple artificial intelligence agent, so it can move through the terrain, avoid particular objects, and enable the generation of sound textures in real time.