Artist John Lifton-Zoline at the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers. Image courtesy Richard Lowenberg.

Whether you’re a plant lover, nature advocate, biotech enthusiast, spiritual seeker, or just a fan of Stevie Wonder, you’ve likely come across the film The Secret Life of Plants. Originally a book by Peter Tomkins and Chris Bird published in 1973, it explored the idea of plant sentience. Although the book was dismissed by the scientific community, the story evolved into a film that pushed forward the argument about plant intelligence. A few know that a fragment of the legendary film was shot in San Francisco, featuring some of the prominent figures of video art and electronic music at the time.

Revisiting the local history – living to the present as the Conservatory of Flowers – we invite you to a screening event, accompanied by a live plant music performance of Kal Spelletich. This is a chance to immerse ourselves in the groovy world of the 70s, to question our inherent speciesism, to reflect on the limitations of our 6-senses-based perception of the world, while also keeping a critical attitude towards some propositions of the film.

This event is curated by Anastasia Chernysheva, Research Fellow at Gray Area.

A view of the “crystal palace” structure opens the scene of The Secret Life of Plants (1979), blurring the boundary between the dream and reality. Within a few seconds exposition changes: walking a viewer inside the greenhouse, along with other visitors. Inside, we see a man operating audio and video synthesizers producing, as one of the screens suggests, “green music.” The whole segment lasts less than 2 minutes. The project featured in the film became a result of a collaboration between John Lifton-Zoline, Jim Wiseman, Tom Zahuranec, and ichard Lowenberg.

The plant music was one among many projects of the series called "Bio-Dis-Plays", a collaboration between artists and NASA in the Bay Area of the 1970s. Using multi-channel bio-telemetry systems, data sourced from performers' physiology (EEG, EKG, EMG, etc.) was fed into audio (Tcherepnin) and video (Sandin/Paik-Abe) synthesizers — allowing the creation of original yet little-known biofeedback media artworks. Recalling work on the project, Lowenberg shared:

"Over the course of four days in June 1976, while open to the public, six large plants in the center of the glass Plant Conservatory in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park (modeled on Kew Gardens, in London), produced an audible, live musical score, based on simple bio-electric sensing of their responses to light, temperature, movement and other physio-environmental factors (sensed by gold needle electrodes at the base of the plant stem/root)." (Lowenberg, 2013)