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Blauglock: An Exercise in Ecological Entanglement (by Tobias Hammerle, Sonja Prlić and Katharina Maria Wimmer)
gold extra´s installation "Blauglock: An Exercise in Ecological Entanglement" can be seen at The Garden Festival in Winchester on June 25!
About the Exhibition
Small Signals, Big Ideas explores how creative practice can augment ecological aesthetics—not simply by representing nature, but by extending how environmental conditions are sensed, perceived, and understood. Drawing on ideas around ecological entanglement and multi-scalar environmental systems, the exhibition focuses on "information islands": discrete, local, and partial ways of encountering nature through sensing, storytelling, material practice, embodiment, and data.
The exhibition asks a vital question for our time: How can these small, specific encounters become tactics for building resistance, resilience, and agency in how environmental knowledge is produced, shared, and acted on?
Blauglock: An Exercise in Ecological Entanglement (by Tobias Hammerle, Sonja Prlić and Katharina Maria Wimmer)
Blauglock Containment (also known as the Blauglock Prison Break) fits deeply into this exploration of situated knowledge and embodiment.
In the installation, participants are cast as the warden of a subterranean high-security facility holding a sentient, potentially dangerous alien plant named "Blauglock." To keep the plant alive—but prevent it from growing strong enough to break out—participants must carefully manage its hydration and anger levels.
Rather than using traditional digital controls, participants interact with the system using a physical, sensor-equipped watering can. Tilting the can triggers real-time data flows via an embedded ESP32 microcontroller, blending physical material practice with a digital interface.
Crucially, the system is not a closed loop. Blauglock is connected to a live meteorological feed from Salzburg. When it rains in the real world, the virtual containment cell gets watered. This forces players to adapt their localized actions to live macro-environmental data, perfectly capturing the exhibition's theme of "extending how environmental conditions are sensed" and creating a tangible link between local embodiment and broader planetary systems.
We invite you to come interact with Blauglock, tilt the watering can, and experience this unique intersection of storytelling, sensor data, and ecological resistance.
Find out more about the exhibition here:
Small Signals, Big Ideas – The Garden Festival
