Phytomechatronic Experiment #1 2023 – present (ongoing)
The Healing Leaves project began as an Earth Day activity at Burlington City Arts in Burlington, Vermont. While a collection of the Damaged Leaf Dataset was on view in one of its galleries, a 2023 Earth Day event invited families to heal the damaged leaves. We provided participants with printed images of damaged leaves and colored pencils; they could “heal” or “repair” the leaves by filling out the sections of the leaves that caterpillars had eaten.
4.8 x 4.8 inches.
The Pant Machine Design Group picked up this project. We customized a generative adversarial network (GAN) and trained it on two datasets simultaneously. One dataset is of Gen I leaves, specifically red oak leaves eaten by spongy moth caterpillars, and the second dataset, the Whole Leaf Dataset (WLD), is a collection of whole red oak leaves. The model is trained to speculate on what the damaged leaf looked like before it was eaten. The model also has the capacity to speculate on what a whole leaf would look like if the caterpillars ate it. The model and the dataset continue to be adjusted to improve its output.
In addition to the model’s speculative images, we have customized it to reveal its inner workings, such as how it analyzes and “thinks” about the leaves and draws its conclusions. At each layer of its neural network, it outputs an image that reveals its process. The process revealed is machine thinking, caring, learning, and growing, making the project an experiment that provides an exciting opportunity to contrast machine thinking, caring, learning, and growing with that of both humans and botanicals.
Gallery visitors will have the opportunity to interact with our model and heal leaves in the exhibition The Generative Tree ( January 10 – March 15, 2025 ).
We will share the gallery app soon.
Healing Damaged Leaves on Earth Day. Burlington City Arts, 2023.
