This biomechanical art installation gets stabby to the beat of a rhododendron's electrical noise

Kinetic installation artist David Bowen has given a rhododendron a really big knife, the power to use it, and therefore, a degree of agency not enjoyed by the kingdom Plantae since the Cambrian era. His latest piece, Plant Machete, melds a woody shrub with an industrial robot arm and slaps a machete to the business end of it. On the other end, a series of electrical pickups monitor the bioelectrical noise generated by the plant. Living plant controls a machete through an industrial robot arm pic.twitter.com/jQYzMzoG0W "The system uses an open source microcontroller connected to the plant to read varying resistance signals across the plant's leaves," Bowen wrote.