We propose to reconfigure the relationship between humans and weeds by giving people a space to reconsider these symbols of the pervasiveness of untamed nature. Alluding to ancient rituals, the installation invites the audience to gather around a rotating weed and listen to a meditative soundscape generated from the shape of its leaves. The ritual setting elevates the weed from its lowly cultural position and allows participants to empathise with the plant itself, bringing awareness to their own interconnectedness with other forms of life.
The leaves of the weed have been scanned, traced and transposed via the Processing development environment to produce a numerical representation of their contours. This data is then reinterpreted as an acoustic waveform and stored as a .wav file, using the NumPy and Wave packages of the Python programming language. As the weed rotates on the platform, its leaves fade in and out of the soundscape depending on their location relative to the listener.
Source code and contour data freely available on GitHub at www.github.com/yunque/weeds