Essay Concerning Human Understanding—Eduardo Kac and Ikuo Nakamura
Essay Concerning Human Understanding was a long-distance sound installation created by Eduardo Kac and Ikuo Nakamura in 1994 that allowed a canary in Lexington, Kentucky to communicate with a philodendron plant 600 miles away in New York. A microphone and speaker connected to a circuit board was placed near the canary’s cage, which transmitted audio to an electrode attached to the plant’s leaf. This electrode also captured stimulus from the plant, and the entire communication loop was delivered through the telephone system.
Kac and Nakamura’s installation serves as a stand-in for the human communicative experience—a window through which we can detach ourselves from learned behaviors and observe the technologies we take for granted. When we see the plant and the bird communicating, we might remark that the complexity of the system and distance that the sound data must travel would surely mean that these two creatures were just not meant to speak to one another. And yet, globalization (as both cause and effect) makes this demand of humans daily. It is not until we see this process from another perspective that we realize the absurdity of it.