Open research · live now · beyond the plant
Savia Flow: two electrodes, a living current, and an open question.
Every living cell holds a voltage across its membrane. Ion channels open, charge moves, and that voltage swings. Two electrodes read the swing in millivolts, and we map it: current to pitch, a spike to the moment a note fires, the same current to light, or to a message sent to the next node. A frequency is not a sound we invented. It is a current in a flow, read out loud.
None of that is new, and I want to be exact about it. PlantWave, Plants Play and Music of the Plants built this field and they built it well. Plants were already signalling long before any of us put a wire on one: Savia does not give a plant a voice, it is the readout. What I am adding is the part nobody made open: the hardware, the firmware, the console, the bill of materials and the data, all of it public as it happens, so a school or a village can build one instead of buying one.
And it was never really about plants. The instrument does not measure a species: it measures electrical change between two electrodes in something alive and conductive, which is water and ions moving. Put your hand across the same two contacts and it reads you, the way it reads a leaf. Touch is a signal. The science path makes that plainer still: it is an ECG front end, a sensor built for a human heart, pointed at a leaf. A plant was the first thing we put it on, not the edge of what it does.
Someone always chooses the mapping. Much of what people hear as the character of a species is that choice, and most instruments do not admit it. So the mapping surface is the artistic surface, and it is the thing I want a global network of artists to take away from me and make strange: current into frequency, frequency into colour, a touch into a note, sound into light and light back into sound, and every combination we have not tried.
Do those currents carry anything you could call information?
We have not tested it yet. That is the point.
- HardwareCERN-OHL-S, with the bill of materials published, part numbers and all
- Firmware and consoleMIT. Runs offline on any phone, and takes a unit over Bluetooth, a 555 rig through the headphone jack, MIDI, or nothing at all
- The runbookSixteen steps, each one with an exit test, so somebody else can repeat it
- The datasetOpen. One lab has one subject, and this question needs many living things in many places
I am a first-time researcher with no PhD, no institution and no lab, building this on a bench at a residency in Austria. Support pays for live activations, for hardware iterations, and for getting kits into the hands of artists and communities who will point this at something living somewhere I will never go.
The console runs in your browser with no hardware at all, so you can hear what the mapping does before you decide whether any of this is worth backing.
