PL'AI

PL’AI (2020) is an AI-driven installation by Špela Petrič that reimagines the relationship between technology and plant life. At its center, a robotic system shares space with living cucumber plants, slowly lowering colorful suspended spheres toward the cucumber plants' searching tendrils. Equipped with LiDAR scanners, cameras, and machine-learning algorithms, the robot continuously observes plant growth and adapts its behavior in response to the plants’ movements. Visitors encounter an unusual scene: a technological apparatus that has entered plant time to engage in an open-ended act of play, which can only be glimpsed by humans through time-lapsed video.

The work emerges from critical debates surrounding biomedia, datafication, and the expansion of algorithmic governance beyond human life. While contemporary agriculture increasingly subjects plants to intensive surveillance and automation in the name of efficiency, PL’AI asks whether artificial intelligence can be redirected toward non-extractive forms of relation. Its point of departure is the proposition that plants, like all living beings, have the capacity to play, as it an unalienable capacity that comes with being alive. At the same time, play lies outside the purview of science, since it challenges its epistemological framework.

As cucumber tendrils grasp the robot’s wires, both plant and machine become shaped by each other’s actions. The installation thus stages a speculative encounter between biological and artificial agencies, proposing play as a mode of interaction that challenges anthropocentric assumptions about plants, but also invites us to expand the horizon of what technology could be.