Digiscape - Beneath the Signal

- 2025

Project Type | Interactive Installation

Credits:

Visual Design | Ke Jyun Wu
Sound Design | Nick Tsai

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Someone at an exhibition asked me, "Did you know plants can talk to each other?"

I laughed. It sounded ridiculous. Then I went home and looked it up, and it turns out the ridiculous thing is that it's true. Under every forest floor there's a network connecting plants and fungi, passing nutrients, warnings, maybe something like memory. Mycelia. It's been there for hundreds of millions of years, running quietly beneath every step we've ever taken on soil.

I couldn't stop thinking about it. Not the science. The feeling. That something this vast and this old has been right under our feet the whole time, and we just never learned to listen.

What if you could hear that conversation?

While I was researching, I found Playtronica's Biotron, a sensor that reads micro-fluctuations in electrical resistance when someone touches a living organism. It gives plants a signal that digital systems can interpret. I reached out, we connected, and the collaboration became the foundation of this piece.

The installation centers on a terrarium I had custom-made. Real moss, real soil, real plants. When you reach in, the smell hits you first. Grassy, earthy, the kind that sticks to your fingers. That part matters to me. Most interactive works start with a gesture or a screen. This one starts with you putting your hand into dirt.

Your touch generates bioelectric data. The Biotron reads it and feeds it into real-time generative visuals: digital flora grows, blooms, and shifts on the surrounding screens, as though the moss is relaying what it felt to a parallel world. The room smells like wet earth. The screen moves because something alive was touched.

I don't try to explain how mycelia work. The piece isn't educational. It's closer to an invitation: what would it feel like to join a conversation that started long before you showed up, and will keep going after you leave?