reactive botany

Reactive Botany was powered by a grant from season two of the Realise Your Somerset Project, the youth grant that funds ground-up stuff along the Somerset Belt. The grant went to me and Luke Goh, so the two of us led it, and the rest of Krusty Labs, our small collective of creative technologists, helped us run the whole thing. It ran as part of Somerfest 2022.

The pitch was a light garden that the community builds itself. We set up free workshops where anyone could come in and make a flower with a glue gun, and every flower made went into a public installation in one of the containers at Somerset Youth Park. So instead of us making the whole artwork and people just walking past it, the people who came by made it with us.

The flowers are made out of glue sticks. In the workshops we taught people how to make their own with glue guns, so every flower came out a little different from the one next to it.

So the pipeline goes: workshop → glue gun → a translucent white flower → a spot on the wall in the park.

We teased it on Instagram the night before Somerfest opened, and by 10 December the workshop was full, with more than 400 sign ups. Anyone who missed out could still walk in and try their luck.

Inside the container, the flowers hang on strings against a wall of greenery and light up, changing colour in reaction to sound. People could walk right up to the wall, find their own flower and make some noise at it.

It was free and open to the public, as part of Somerfest 2022, made with the Somerset Belt and powered by the National Youth Council.