The beauty of a flower is simple, pure, and joyful. The majesty of the annual - blooming for one short moment, before withering away - plays out the tragedy of life in a single act: 'we grow, we are beautiful, we die'; while the solitary flower domesticated in a pot is emblematic of a suburban summer's day. The robot flowers of Floribots overlay familiar notions of the flowerpot with a shifted reality of technological autonomy and virtual agency.
Floribots, is an interactive, collective organism made up of 128 robot flowerpots equipped with telescopic stems and origami flowers. Each flower starts as a bud - which grows to its full height of over a metre and suddenly blooms with a distinct 'wap' sound. Soon afterwards, the bloom withers back to its flowerpot and returns to its bud state. Floribots is an electronic 'field of flowers' that dances in unison, with choreography provided by an embedded microcontroller and influenced by the 'mood' of its hive mind and the actions of the audience.
Floribots was produced with the assistance of ArtsWA, Altronics, JED Microprocessors, and Onesteel.
Free artist's floortalk Thursday 1 March, 6pm. Free exhibition publication available from PICA during the exhibition.
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