By breathing on the Infobreath “cybernetic” lilly, people trigger a flurry of text, making visible the wireless internet traffic passing through the air. Rigged with a breath sensor and connected to the Carnivore sniffer, the flower is cued in to the wireless network flowing in the space surrounding it. The plant absorbs and analyzes this information, and releases those packets in a form comprehensible to humans.
A piezo breath sensor registers the breath. The microcontroller attached to the plant converts these signals for the computer and the carnivore client captures network traffic through the computer’s wireless card. 4. the int
Infobreath imagines a world in which the carbon dioxide we exhale carries comprehensible information, and envisions the transfer of carbon dioxide to oxygen within a plant as a transfer of information: an information ecosystem. It imagines the plant, buffeted by streams of wireless data, sifting through those pings and packets for the few elements sent from one human to another, and reflecting those living packets of internet data back to us, in an elemental attempt at communication.
InfoBreath was created by Christopher Robbins, building upon code by Christobal Mendoza, Tom Igoe, and the Radical Software Group.
More flower-based works: Whisper, Life Support Systems – Vanda, the flower speaker. Also: Ptooie: the packet sniffer and HotSpot Bloom.