Technological Mediations for Interspecies Communication 

This essay on the limits of translation and live art exhibits is the nineteenth installment of the Botanical Imaginations series, which complicates, diversifies, and proliferates the stories we tell about plants. Series editors: Laleh Ahmad, Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Ellie Kincaid, Rebecca Laurent, Kayleigh Lobdell, Clare Michaud, Nicolás Felipe Rueda Rey

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Historically, Western philosophy has often placed humans at the center of meaning-making. Today, artists create installations in which plants, fungi, and microbes interact with sensors. These works are often described as forms of inter-species communication, understood as a process of translation. Yet this model of translation deserves closer scrutiny. Translation presupposes a conception of language as a transferable vehicle of meaning, as well as the existence of a shared communicative framework between sender and receiver. 

When applied to vegetal or fungal life, translation risks reinforcing anthropocentric models of language, intention, and agency. 

Rather than asking what plants say, I am interested in how relations between humans, non-human organisms, and technologies are produced. How can art create situations in which inter-species relations persist without being reduced to messages, meanings, or proofs? I approach this question through three biomedia and computational installations: Ghostly Plants of Damaged Worlds, in which albino plants grow in contaminated soil monitored by environmental sensors; Fungical Language, which connects fluctuations in mycelial electrical activity to a system generating visual and symbolic forms; and Incub.AI.tor*(Ghost cells), which combines plant-based scaffolds, living tissues, EMG sensing, and machine-learning analysis.

Through these works, I explore how artistic practice becomes less a matter of translating the living than of composing conditions in which distributed forms of agency can emerge. 

Language Is Not a Universal Bridge 

Inside my artwork Ghostly Plants of Damaged Worlds, albino plants grow in soil contaminated by industrial pollution. Their presence is pale, fragile, almost spectral. Over time, their transformations become visible: altered pigmentation, slowed growth, subtle epigenetic shifts shaped by toxicity. Sensors register environmental conditions, including humidity, conductivity, and the presence of heavy metals in the soil. This data modulates light and sound within the installation. 

The conversion of environmental and biological variations into sensory forms may initially give the impression that the plants are sending signals to the viewer. Yet nothing suggests that the plants are addressing us.       

The devices do not claim to translate vegetal processes into human speech. They do not promise access to an interior message. What they make perceptible are transformations—chemical, environmental, temporal—that unfold without being organized as discourse. The plants act and transform—they do not speak. 

This distinction becomes striking when set against a broader tendency in contemporary art, where vegetal and fungal communication has become a recurring framework for thinking about relations between humans, non-human organisms, and technologies. One recent example is Nastja Ambrožič’s Hyphera, an experimental installation in which two plants growing in separate substrates are connected by a mycelial bridge.

Through biosensing and electrophysiological techniques, the work investigates the activity of this hybrid living system and the forms of relation that emerge among plants, fungi, and technical apparatuses. 

Within biomedia art, media art, and ecological practices, plants, fungi, and microorganisms are often presented as beings capable of sending signals, responding to their environments, or entering into forms of dialogue with human observers. Examples include Saša Spačal’s Myconnect, in which fluctuations in the electrical resistance of fungal mycelium are returned to a human participant through sound, light, and haptic impulses.

Another example is Symbiome – Economy of Symbiosis, in which indirect measurements of metabolic exchange between red clover and rhizobial bacteria are transformed into a real-time sound composition. Where Dogs Run’s Kerosene Chronicles. Greta-Fungus achieves something similar, translating the physiological responses of a fungus into the computational “mood” of a virtual agent.  

In such works, relations between human and non-human organisms are mediated through technological systems that capture biological variations and render them perceptible as sound, image, data, vibration, or interaction. Inter-species communication may consequently be approached as a problem of translation, as though the task were to decode a message already present within the organism. 

The gesture appears intuitive, even generous: to make the living audible, visible, understandable. Yet it also assumes that there is a message already present, waiting to be decoded. Translation promises access to non-human life.  

Standing in front of Ghostly Plants, that promise becomes difficult to sustain. What exactly would be translated? The plants’ stress? Their metabolic responses? Their altered growth? Translation assumes intention and equivalence between species. It presupposes a shared horizon of meaning. The installation offers no such horizon.

It offers exposure instead: exposure to contaminated soil, to altered vegetal growth, to the slow temporality of toxicity, and to forms of vulnerability that do not organize themselves as messages. The viewer is not given access to what the plants “mean” but is placed in relation to the conditions that affect them. What becomes perceptible is not a statement, but a situation. The silence of the installation is therefore not an absence, but a limit: It resists the impulse to convert action into discourse and reveals language not as a universal bridge, but as a boundary. 

This limit is not simply empirical—it is structural. Language has long been associated with interiority, intention, and meaning. To speak is to signify; to lack speech is often taken to imply a lack of sense. But language does not operate independently of the forms of life in which it is embedded. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations shows that meaning emerges from shared practices. Translation therefore requires more than conversion. It depends on a common ground that allows equivalence to take hold. We continue to imagine that plants must, in some way, be “saying” something. 

The plants in Ghostly Plants do not inhabit such a ground. Their activity unfolds in another register—material rather than semantic, responsive rather than expressive. They are not mute. They simply do not operate within the regime in which meaning appears as message. Acting is not the same as speaking. 

If communication with the vegetal cannot be reduced to translation, then the question must be displaced. The question is not what plants say, but how relations with them are produced.

From Translation to Mediation 

In Fungical Language, fungal networks are connected to sensors that register fluctuations in electrical activity within the mycelium. These signals generate visual and symbolic outputs through a computational system. At first encounter, the installation seems to fulfill a familiar promise: to render fungal communication legible and translate an otherwise inaccessible language into human-readable form. 

This promise quickly becomes unstable. The patterns that emerge are not sentences, nor do they convey discrete messages. What appears instead are shifting correlations—rhythms, intensities, circulations—that intersect with algorithmic processes. The system does not decode a hidden language; it stages the conditions under which fungal activity becomes perceptible. 

If Ghostly Plants of Damaged Worlds unsettles the assumption that plants must “speak,” Fungical Language complicates the desire to translate. Even when signals are converted into symbols, equivalence is never secure. What the exhibit presents is not meaning transferred intact from fungus to human, but a mediated field in which heterogeneous processes meet without resolving into a shared code. 

This shift calls for a different conceptual frame. Translation asks what is being said; mediation asks what relations are being produced. Where translation presupposes a message awaiting transfer, mediation begins with a situation. It foregrounds the apparatus—sensors, cables, algorithms, display systems—that configures perception and organizes the encounter.

In Fungical Language, the technical system is therefore not a neutral channel through which fungal signals pass. It participates in shaping what becomes perceptible, and in determining under what conditions fungal activity can appear as communication. 

Soil composition, humidity, electrical conductivity, data processing, and human presence form a hybrid ecology in which communication unfolds. The mycelium does not transmit messages in the linguistic sense; it connects, distributes, and transforms through its own material dynamics. Rather than statements, the installation renders perceptible these dynamics, flows, and variations. 

Meaning, here, does not precede interaction. It emerges from the encounter between fungal processes and computational mediation. Humans, fungi, and machines share a space of co-presence in which no single actor controls the terms of relation. 

By staging connectivity without stabilizing it into discourse, Fungical Language marks a passage from translation to mediation. It suggests that inter-species communication may not depend on decoding hidden messages but on configuring environments in which different forms of life can affect and be affected. 

Technologies Do Not Reveal—They Mediate 

In Incub.AI.tor*(Ghost cells), hybrid organs—developed from plant-based scaffolds and living tissues—are monitored through sensors that register electrical and muscular activity. Through electromyography (EMG), tissue contractions convert into data streams. At first glance, the system seems to offer direct access to the inner state of a living entity—its rhythms, its fluctuations, its vitality. 

This impression of direct access is misleading. The signals do not speak for themselves. They emerge through a chain of technical operations—sampling, filtering, normalization, visualization—that already shape what can be perceived. What appears as raw data is produced through the apparatus that records and processes it. 

This becomes explicit with Cellules Fantômes, the machine-learning software developed as part of the installation. Rather than translating biological signals, it performs predictive analysis based on medical datasets. It compares EMG patterns from the hybrid organ to a dataset of pathological conditions, generating probabilistic correspondences between observed rhythms and established medical profiles.

The output is therefore classificatory: Biological variation is organized according to categories of medical legibility. The question, then, is not what the system reveals, but how it frames the visible. 

To treat such a system as an interpreter would be to assume that meaning pre-exists within the organism, waiting to be decoded. Yet Cellules Fantômes does not extract an intrinsic truth from the living tissue. It frames biological activity through a specific regime of legibility, one shaped by medical datasets, predictive models, and categories of health, anomaly, and pathology. In doing so, it mediates how the living tissue becomes perceptible and interpretable. 

These technologies produce forms of evidence. Graphs, predictive outputs, and visualizations carry an authority that stabilizes interpretation, suggesting that the state of the organism can be known, measured, and classified. Yet this evidence is not neutral. It is shaped by the dataset, the model architecture, and the parameters that guide its operation. Other dimensions of the living—its fragility, its temporality, its entanglement with environmental conditions—remain unaccounted for. 

At the same time, these technologies do not simply reduce the living to data. They render perceptible rhythms and variations that would otherwise remain inaccessible. Their force lies in this double movement: They amplify faint biological rhythms while reformatting them through technical and interpretive frameworks. Technologies extend the field of perception, while also organizing it according to specific regimes of interpretation. 

Incub.AI.tor*(Ghost cells) and Cellules Fantômes position technology as a mediator within a network of relations. Sensors, datasets, algorithms, living tissues, and human observers form an interconnected system in which agency is distributed rather than localized. If inter-species communication emerges within such mediated environments, then it cannot be reduced to the transmission of meaning. It must be understood as a relational process in which technologies actively participate in shaping what kinds of action—and what kinds of life—can appear. 

Agency Is Distributed 

If inter-species communication cannot be grounded in language or translation, the question shifts once more. What is at stake is no longer what is said, but who—or what—acts. To act, here, does not necessarily imply conscious intention. It may mean altering environmental conditions, triggering a technical response, shaping what becomes perceptible, or influencing how other elements in the system behave. In the installations discussed here, agency cannot be located in a single subject. Agency disperses across the system. Do the plants act? The sensors? The algorithms? The viewers? Or does action emerge in the relations that bind them? 

This shift changes how we understand agency. Anthropologist Alfred Gell argues that agency emerges through relations rather than intention. Agency thus becomes perceptible through chains of mediation: One element modifies another, triggers a response, redirects a process, or changes how a situation is interpreted. These consequences may be material, as when toxicity alters plant growth; sensory, as when sensor readings modify light or sound; computational, as when biological fluctuations are reorganized into symbols or classifications; or interpretive, as when these outputs influence how viewers understand the living entity before them.

Objects, organisms, and technical systems can therefore participate in action because their interactions generate observable transformations. 

In Ghostly Plants of Damaged Worlds, contaminated soil affects the plants’ pigmentation and growth, while environmental measurements alter the light and sound experienced by the viewer. In Fungical Language, fluctuations in mycelial electrical activity are processed by a computational system, producing changing visual and symbolic patterns that frame fungal activity as perceptible variation. In Incub.AI.tor*(Ghost cells), contractions in the hybrid tissue generate EMG data that is compared with medical datasets, producing probabilistic classifications that may cause the tissue to be perceived through categories such as health, anomaly, or pathology.

In each case, a biological or environmental variation leads to technical, sensory, and interpretive consequences. No single element acts alone; agency emerges through the circulation of effects across the system. 

This circulation challenges the idea of the artwork as a vehicle of communication. The work does not transmit a message from artist to audience; it produces a field of relations in which heterogeneous entities—human and non-human, organic and technical—interact and affect one another. Meaning is not delivered. It emerges. 

Such a framework also transforms the role of the artist. The artist is no longer a translator of the non-human, nor its spokesperson. Artistic practice becomes a matter of composition: arranging materials, technologies, environments, and temporalities in ways that enable certain relations to take form. The artwork becomes an ecology of actions. The selection of sensors, the design of interfaces, the calibration of datasets, the choice of living materials—all these decisions shape how agency is distributed and perceived. They determine what can act, how it becomes perceptible, and within which frame it is understood. 

To think of agency as distributed is also to acknowledge responsibility. If action emerges through relational configurations, then the artist is accountable for the conditions they compose. Art does not resolve the problem of inter-species communication. It sustains it. By composing situations in which agency is shared rather than centralized, it invites us to consider the uncertainties of relation—where meaning is continuously negotiated through mediated encounters. 

Staying with Mediation 

If agency emerges through chains of mediation, then plants, technologies, and artworks can act without speaking. Sensors, data streams, and algorithmic systems do not simply amplify non-human activity; they select, format, and distribute it through specific regimes of perception. These mediations shape what becomes visible, audible, or legible, while leaving other forms of action unresolved. 

To stay with mediation is to refuse the desire for resolution. It means accepting that inter-species relations may persist without being reducible to language, interpretation, or proof. Silence is not a lack to be overcome, but a condition that resists appropriation.  

In an ecological condition marked by uncertainty and entanglement, staying with mediation offers not a solution, but a stance: one that resists both domination and projection, allowing relations to persist—not as messages to be decoded, but as ongoing processes of co-presence. 

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Featured Image: Ghostly Plants of Damaged Worlds. Photo courtesy of Hana Marn / Kapelica Gallery, 2024.

Alizée Armet is an artist and researcher working at the intersection of art, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence. Her installations explore inter-species relations, mediated ecologies, and the agency of living systems. She holds a Ph.D. in contemporary art from the University of the Basque Country and is currently based in Montreal. Contact.