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World Sensorium / Conservancy

@worldsensorium

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World flora came together in social olfactory art. We must come together to conserve iconic plants of global heritage.
@nallsstudio

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WHAT DID YOU HEAR?

Listening changes the question

Throughout Climate Week, we have listened to plants as active, responsive participants in a shared living world.

But listening must continue after the recordings end.

Protect native plants. Restore habitat. Reduce pesticide use. Conserve water. Support climate action. Make room for biodiversity. Learn the species growing where you live—and pay attention to what their changing rhythms reveal.

The living world is communicating all around us. The question is not only whether plants can be heard.

It is whether humanity will listen in time.

Join WORLD SENSORIUM CONSERVANCY worldsensorium.com

Music by @willowg_music released to support @agamirecords

#ListenToTheLivingWorld #ClimateListening #PlantSounds #ClimateAction by @worldsensorium

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4 days ago

EVERY BREATH BEGINS IN RELATIONSHIP

Plants do not experience climate change alone.

Plants shape the atmosphere, regulate water, store carbon, cool landscapes, nourish ecosystems, and sustain the lives of countless species—including our own. Yet human activity rapidly changes the environmental conditions in which plants evolved.

Their future and ours are inseparable.

The patterns and sounds here are notes that depict biodata from a Gardenia. Biosonification converts changes within the body of the plant into MIDI notes, which can then “play” digital instruments. Like the biodiversity we can see within thriving ecosystems, each organism has a unique “pattern” or internal rhythm.

For Climate Week, World Sensorium Conservancy invites you to listen to the bioacoustic and sonified signals of plant life — and to recognize the living world as a community of relationships rather than a collection of resources.

We share one atmosphere. We share one climate. We share responsibility for what comes next.

Data collected by @willowg_music

#ClimateWeek #PlantBioacoustics #MoreThanHumanWorld #nycclimateweek by @worldsensorium

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5 days ago

Bring a bottle of perfume you’d rather smash than wear.

That forgotten fragrance on your shelf has a place in Andreas Keller’s Perpetual Perfume Stew: a performance creating an artwork made from perfumes people no longer wish to use. Each contribution joins a mixture that is never emptied, slowly drifting toward the statistical center of contemporary perfumery.

Bring a bottle. Add it to the stew. Receive a bottle of the ever-changing concoction in return.

What would you contribute?

@olfactory_art_keller

#OlfactoryArt #PerpetualPerfumeStew #FragranceCommunity #ExperimentalArt #ScentMemory by @worldsensorium

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5 days ago

CAN WE HEAR A PLANT UNDER STRESS?

Drought and extreme heat alter nearly every aspect of plant life — from photosynthesis and water transport to flowering, fragrance, growth, and survival. Bioacoustic research offer new ways of perceiving these changes; for instance, scientists have found that water stressed plants emit ultrasonic “pops” through the xylem, tubular parts of the circulatory system of a plant, like veins or arteries that run through their stems. Insects and possibly other organisms can already sense this communication. We are learning to listen, slowly.

Climate change is not an abstract future. It is already moving through roots, leaves, forests, grasslands, and agricultural fields.

Turn up the sound. Listen closely.

Music by @willowg_music released to support @agamirecords

#ListenToTheLivingWorld #ClimateWeek #PlantSounds #ClimateCrisis #WorldSensorium by @worldsensorium

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6 days ago

PLANTS ARE NOT SILENT: Join World Sensorium in celebrating — and paying closer attention to — the flora that share our world, support our lives, and live alongside us in a changing environment.

A plant responds continuously to its environment — to sunlight, temperature, moisture, touch, insects, injury, and atmospheric change.

Some of these responses produce vibrations or ultrasonic emissions. Others can be converted into sound through biosonification.

Listening does not give plants a human voice, yet it helps us perceive biological activity that ordinarily exists beyond the range of our senses. What might become possible when we learn to listen differently?

Part of the music in this video was created in collaboration with plants through biosonification, which involves turning processes within organisms into music or sound. Electrodes and a midi-data biosonification device convert changes in micro-conductivity in plants and fungi to midi notes, which “play” digital instruments, essentially allowing us to hear the internal status, or “aliveness” of an organism represented as sound.

Video and sound by @willowg_music

#ListenToTheLivingWorld #ClimateWeek #PlantBioacoustics #WorldSensorium #SensoryEcology by @worldsensorium

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7 days ago

Aren’t they beautiful!

Summer’s end is the perfect time to focus on seed saving.

As climate pressures intensify, healthy, regionally adapted seeds are among a garden’s most valuable resources. Seeds gathered from plants that have thrived in local soil, weather, and growing conditions carry the potential for future resilience.

Saving seeds also protects biodiversity, preserves distinctive varieties, and keeps generations of agricultural and cultural knowledge alive. Each seed holds more than the promise of another plant—it carries a history of adaptation, nourishment, and our enduring relationship with the land.

Collect seeds from your strongest, healthiest plants. Dry and label them carefully. Share them with neighbors, community gardens, and local seed libraries.

The garden may be fading, but its future is already forming in your hands.

Join WORLD SENSORIUM CONSERVANCY
worldsensorium.com

#SeedSaving #ClimateResilience #Biodiversity #RegionalSeeds #worldsensoriumconservancy by @worldsensorium

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13 days ago

What can ancient forests teach us about the climate future we are creating?

Fifty-six million years ago, during one of Earth’s most intense periods of global warming, forests in what is now Wyoming reached a critical threshold. As temperatures climbed, heat and drought overwhelmed the trees, shrinking forest canopies by an astonishing 60 percent. Recovery took more than 100,000 years.

In this fascinating article, paleobotanist Regan E. Dunn turns to fossil leaves to reconstruct these ancient forests and reveal what happened when rising carbon dioxide and extreme heat pushed them beyond their physiological limits.

The findings carry an urgent warning for the present. Forests can be remarkably resilient, but ecological recovery unfolds on a timescale profoundly different from our own—and today’s human-driven warming is occurring far faster than the ancient event preserved in the fossil record.

The past is speaking through the leaves. Are we listening in time?

Read Ancient Forests Took 100,000 Years to Recover from the Last Global Warming Period Similar to Today—Wyoming Fossils Reveal What Happened

at WORLDSENSORIUM.COM/PLANTINGS

#AncientForests #ClimateChange #GlobalWarming #ForestEcology #Paleobotany by @worldsensorium

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15 days ago

What if the year were measured not in months, but in smells?

In A Calendar of Smells, John Steele traces the changing seasons through the fragrances that mark time in the body and memory—from autumn’s damp fallen leaves and winter pine to the hyacinths, lilacs, peonies, and honeysuckle of spring, followed by the jasmine and gardenia of summer.

Moving through literature, science, and personal recollection, Steele explores scent’s uncanny power to collapse time—returning us in an instant to people, places, and moments we thought were gone.

“A clock moves forward; a smell circles back.”

A meditation on the fragrant calendar each of us carries within—and the ways the past continues to reach forward through the living world.

Read A Calendar of Smells at worldsensorium.com/plantings Link in bio.

#ACalendarOfSmells #PlantingsJournal #SenseOfSmell #OlfactoryMemory#SeasonalScents by @worldsensorium

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16 days ago

Fireflies, living light, and a landscape coming back to life.

On summer evenings, as darkness settles over an unmown field, hundreds of tiny lights rise among the grasses and wildflowers. What appears almost celestial is one of nature’s most extraordinary forms of communication—a living language of light refined over millions of years.

In “Bioluminescence and Living Earth,” Gayil Nalls explores the remarkable biology of fireflies and what their return reveals about the health of the landscapes we inhabit.

By leaving grasses unmown, allowing fallen leaves to decompose, planting native species, avoiding pesticides, and preserving the darkness of night, even a backyard or field can become meaningful habitat.

The reward is both an ecological lesson and a moment of wonder: stars and planets shining overhead while fireflies illuminate the living world below—one light arriving across astronomical distances, the other rising from the soil beneath our feet.

Read the article at worldsensorium.com/plantings

#Fireflies #Bioluminescence #LivingLight #Nativeplants #plantings by @worldsensorium

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17 days ago

In “When Flowers Keep Time: How Circadian Rhythms Shape the World of Scent,” Gayil Nalls explores the fascinating relationship between biological clocks and fragrance.

Flowers do not release their scent continuously. Many emit their strongest aromas during the hours when their pollinators are most active. At the same time, our own sensitivity to smell changes throughout the day.

The result is an extraordinary encounter between two living rhythms: the flower’s internal clock and our own circadian clock.

From roses fragrant at dawn to jasmine opening into scent at dusk, fragrance is revealed not as something fixed, but as an unfolding ecological conversation—shaped by evolution, pollination, light, climate, and time.

Perhaps a flower does not simply have a scent.

Perhaps it has an hour.

Find out how flowers and our own sense of smell are keeping time!

Read the article at worldsensorium.com/plantings

#PlantingsJournal #CircadianRhythms #FlowerScent #OlfactoryHeritage #ScentEcology by @worldsensorium

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20 days ago

What is the future of perfumery and what might be lost if we fail to protect the aromatic world on which it self-reports to depend?

In a provocative conversation with Gayil Nalls, master perfumer, engineer, and avant-garde scent artist Christophe Laudamiel explores disappearing aromatic landscapes, the largely untapped olfactory potential of plants, the ethics of natural ingredients, and the effects of climate change on our fragrant heritage.

Challenging an industry too often disconnected from the farmers, ecosystems, and botanical materials that sustain it, Laudamiel calls for greater transparency, experimentation, and discernment, and for scent to be recognized as an essential part of humanity’s cultural and ecological memory.

Read the full conversation in Plantings at: worldsensorium.com/plantings

@christophelaudamiel

#ChristopheLaudamiel #Plantings #Perfumery #OlfactoryArt #AromaticPlants by @worldsensorium

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24 days ago

From flower to fruit.

Beneath the soft purple petals of an eggplant blossom, a tiny eggplant has begun to take shape. This delicate flower is already performing its quiet alchemy—transforming sunlight, water, soil, and pollination into food.

Moments like this remind us that every harvest begins with a flower—and every fruit is a small act of wonder.

Join the World Sensorium Conservancy
worldsensorium.com

#EggplantFlower #GardenWonder #FromFlowerToFruit #EatMorePlants #KitchenGarden PlantLife by @worldsensorium

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25 days ago