Life Support Systems: Vanda explores the possibilities to upload signals from a Vanda Hybrida orchid into a Microsoft Xbox, as a kind of longevity through computing. This work is an ongoing project which reshapes itself in parallell to scientific developments, exhibition contexts, and other changing parameters. The goal is to create a virtual organism from this orchid which can exist indefinitely, kept alive inside computer media in the form of a datastructure based on current ai technologies such as neural networks and hidden markov models. After the live individual is disconnected, its virtual counterpart will continue to generate signals which mimic the patterns of the original.

A Turing Test is a pragmatic definition of a successful artificial entity. This model formulates serious data reduction of a whole personality and its communication, which is compressed into typed language through a computer terminal. Similarly, we consider a reduction of information which communicates plant behavioral patterns to just one electrical signal. In both cases, almost all information is discarded except a small core from which mental or technical images can be reconstructed.

Extracellular biopotential is an electrical charge present in any living organism. This charge can be measured and digitized. In a plant, measuring this charge yields a slowly moving signal, which moves along with the plant growth processes and internal chemistry. The signal does not react to people in the vincinity, or any kind of mystical events - such results are considered to be measuring errors. Rather, the signal is an indicator of the general state and well being in the plant, as well as its growth rhythm over time. Different plants which experience different conditions in life will produce unique signals. The installation shows the setup for capturing this signal, a life supporting environment for the orchid, and visualization/auralization of captured data.

The installation is put together through a process of evolution - it has changed to accomodate various exhibition contexts, broken items have been replaced with others, technology has been discarded and upgraded, different sponsors have donated materials to the project. It has converged into an undesigned lab with a mix of cheap and expensive materials based on what works. In the end, the container for the new entity turned out to be a Microsoft Xbox, which is hacked to act as a ftp server with a hard drive. Finally, this lab raises questions about the nature of this new datastructure/entity. The captured datastructure is visualized and auralized using two standard methods - a selforganizing network in 3d space, and a sound constructed by sending sinetones through this network.

The work received a distinction award at Ars Electronica 2005.