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okno rooftop garden

General description

The Open Green project blends organic and technological matter into one and the same nature. Through analogue and digital means we do long term observations on the growth, blossoming and decay of plants and insects submitted to natural elements such as wind, sun, rain and pollution in an urban context.
We monitor and extract data from natural processes both on a micro garden level as on a macro city level and make the data available online in realtime with open wireless citynetworks.

We research the connections between people, technology and the possible applications of the rooftop gardens. Can the gardens’ evolution be controlled, generated, enhanced or imagined in artworks? Does the fusion of natural and artificial matter produce new organisms, new environments, new forms of nature? Can technology animate nature and vice versa?
The Open Green is an artificial environment, a hybrid of nature and culture. The harvest is about scraping data of any kind from the garden and using it for organic ánd media applications.

Ecological description

The wild flower garden is a patch where we observe month by month the evolution of pioneer-plants brought by the wind and the birds.
Both gardens form a basis for experiments between nature and culture, plants and electronics, organic and digital examination methods.

We store the data of our long-term observations in the Open Green Database.
This relational database covers and reveals information on all elements of the Open Green rooftop gardens in numbers, text and images. Historical and current state of the gardens, goals of the project, people involved, sustainability factor. Permanent quadrat monitoring and poetic observations. It offers links to existing databases for further detailed information on plant- and animallife. It informs on data gathering and data treatment.

Sociological description

Okno is an artist run media organisation. Different artists work on long term projects, especially on technological art inspired by natural processes.
We are researchers, electronica engineers, scientists, academics, writers, musicians, cooks, developers, coders and much more.