Plants can create and manipulate human desires and actions by being beautiful, useful or providing drugs. The poppy plant combines all three keys of manipulating desires: It produces beautiful flowers, edible seeds and morphine, the basis for opium and heroin. How could the poppy plant use its manipulating potential – and what could it intend?
The third object in the Planterious series is a Glimpse of a distant future, a speculation about the evolution and possible agenda of the poppy plant. In this future, the poppy learned to grow sweet fruits filled with heroin. Attracting the human with its red color and its new ability to shine, it lures people closer and waits for them to taste the addictive fruits. Once hooked, the human starts to neglect their roles in society and only cares about the poppy plant, which is slowly rising to the rank of a sacred being. People no longer depend on other humans but on the poppy plant for its addictive fruits and will therefore make sure it has perfect conditions to grow, leading to a long and happy life for the wild poppy plant.
The Glimpse consists of two artifacts from this obscure future. The first is a statue that has similarities to a totem, a sacred object used for the prayer to a being of the natural world. The center of the flower shape on top glows slightly in a pulsing rhythm, symbolizing the poppy plant’s new ability to shine. The second part is a notebook, a handmade documentation by a person living in this weird future. It shows portrays of hostile humans with strange symbols on their faces; rituals, maps, detailed images of the plant’s flower and a fruit in bright red and pinkish shades. In this future, what used to be important to mankind has been neglected and nature is taking over while humans sacrifice their energy to care for the poppy plant and hunt its precious fruits.
This object is part of the Planterious project developed as a Master Project in the Digital Media Master at HfK Bremen.
