This reflection is going delve into how we can create an anthropomorphic connection for our audience with our sentient and magical tree species —The Arbors.
For context, our planet is inhabited by the Codans who, through their selfish exploitation of the life-giving, shade-providing, and fruit-bearing Arbors, are able to survive on the surface of Coda, where previously they had not been able to survive. After years of building their civilization from the tree’s resources and using chemicals to keep their production high, the trees begin to die (much like that of our earth and agricultural farming (Kaplan 2021)). As a result, the Arbors choose to stop producing fruit and leaves, remaining in a dormant state, declaring war against the Codans by making the world uninhabitable. Ultimately, neither side survives, and the question remains: Who were the bad guys? Who caused this complete catastrophe?
Our job as museum curators is to allow our audience to piece together the sorry of this world through the clues they leave behind. We ultimately want there to be freedom to choose your own version of the story through interpretation; however, a journal article (Miralles et al. 2019) on empathy and compassion of humans has shown that humans have an empathetic bias towards other beings that look the closest to human, over beings that are further phylogenetically removed from humans. Plants have the lowest probability of extracting empathy from humans. This leaves us with the question, how do we create an anthropomorphic connection with the Arbors?
Miralles, Raymond, and Lecointre (2019) theorize that compassion and empathy are the key interloping emotions that dictate the level of empathy we feel towards a being. Building an emotional connection to trees, it “mostly depend[s] on the quantity of external features that can intuitively be perceived as homologous to those of humans.” (Miralles et al. 2019).
In an attempt to find another way to communicate likenesses other than external looks, I looked at an analysis by Hayward (2023) that researched how plants make noise on a level that is incomprehensible to the human ear. Hayward likens the noise they make to chatter, and when they are in pain, the noise increases, like a human screaming for help. This communication will be pivotal and create a human connection; even if the language or words are unrecognizable, the emotional weight of the noise helps to create empathy that leads to an anthropomorphic bond. Similar to how audience members cry while watching Opera in a foreign language (Wilson 2019), the parasympathetic nervous system is activated by melody rather than language.
My final thought from this research is that the closer to humans we can make our trees look and feel, the higher chance we have of creating an anthropomorphic bond. We will pursue this with a homologous design of the trees and empathetic, emotionally charged vocal communication.
We will be making the shape of our trees to have trunks that closely resemble the arms and legs of a human, trying to emanate the shape of bodily structure. We will also make ambient noise to add to the museum experience and promote empathy, recreating the wails that the Arbors would’ve made as they die and imitating distressed human communication.
Bibliography:
Hanano A, Murphy C, and Murphy D J, (2022) Plants Can “Speak” to each other, Frontiers, Accessed 11 May 2023. https://kids.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frym.2022.658692
Hayward A (2023) The Conversation: Plants can ‘talk,’ and scientists have recorded the sound they make as they die of thirst, ABC News Website, accessed 11 May 2023. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-31/plants-talk-die-of-thirst-popping-sound/102167028
Kaplan S (2021) Client and Environment; Air pollution from farm leads to 17,900 U.S. deaths per year, study finds, The Washington Post, Accessed 11 May 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/05/10/farm-pollution-deaths/
Miralles A, Raymond M, and Lecointre G (2019) Empathy and Compassion toward other species decreases with evolutionary divergence time, Scientific Reports Journal, article 19555, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-56006-9.
Wilson F (2019) Moved to Tears, Interlude UK Website, accessed 11 May 2023. https://interlude.hk/moved-tears/#:~:text=Tears%20and%20chills%20%E2%80%93%20or%20%E2%80%9Ctingles,experience%20this%20reaction%20to%20music.
Authors Note:
I apologetically surpassed the word limit, but I am hoping that you’ll find this as fascinating as I did and will be kind to this enthusiastic discoverer.
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