Spore 1.1

Spore 1.1

Spore 1.1 is a self-sustaining ecosystem for a rubber tree plant that was purchased at The Home Depot. In this work, The Home Depot is responsible for the plant in two ways: First, the store’s one-year unconditional guarantee to replace any plant that they sell; and second, an implied cybernetic contract that is enforced when the plant is placed within the Spore 1.1 ecosystem.

The latter responsibility ties the economic health of The Home Depot to the physical health of the rubber tree through a mechanism programmed to control the amount of water that the plant receives. Spore 1.1 uses an on-board computer with a Wi-Fi connection to monitor The Home Depot’s stock price at the end of each week, keeping a database of week-to-week stock fluctuations. As The Home Depot’s stock value grows, so too does the plant. If the company suffers losses, the plant does not get watered. If the plant should perish due to poor stock performance, it is returned to The Home Depot and replaced with another at no additional cost—a burden that represents a real, if marginal, recourse against poor corporate management.

Exhibitions: USF Contemporary Art Museum, VIDA 7.0 (1st Prize),SIGGRAPH 2005 / Emerging Technologies, International Art Fair, ARCO, Madrid, Leonardo II Exhibition, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), SIGCHI, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Nicograph International, The Society for Art and Science, Seoul, South Korea, Art and Artificial Life Retrospective: VIDA, (In)Habitation, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Human + , Science Gallery, Dublin,