Fergie's Tech Blog

Rubber tree plant's health tied to Home Depot's stock price

You can tell I'm a hopeless gadget-guy, since this article simply fascinated me. :-)

David Pescovitz writes over on Boing Boing:

In this project, titled Spore 1.1, the life or death of this rubber tree plant is tied to fluctuations in Home Depot's stock. Created by Douglas Easterly and Matt Kenyon, Spore 1.1 was exhibited at last week's SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles. The project is in the tradition of Nancy Patterson's Stock Market Skirt, Koert van Mensvoort's Data Fountain, and Roy Want's Internet Stock Fountain at Xerox PARC. From the artist statement:

In this project, Home Depot is responsible for the plant in two ways: first, an unconditional guarantee to replace any plant they sell, for up to one year; secondly through an implied cybernetic contract. This second responsibility is the creative content for the work, where Home Depot's economic health is transitioned through a series of physical computing techniques to a mechanism for controlling the watering of the plant. An onboard computer uses a Wi-Fi connection to access Home Depot stock quotes once per week, keeping a database of these week ending stock values.

From the fluctuations in Home Depot stock, various programs and circuitry are controlled accordingly. As the company does well, so does the plant - if the company suffers losses, Spore 1.1 does not get watered. If the plant should parish, due to poor stock performance, it is returned to the Home Depot and replaced with another-at no additional cost.

Link to project page, Link to technical paper PDF (Thanks, Cynthia Bruyns!)

posted by Fergie @ 8/08/2005 08:48:00 AM