Skooby Laposky has scored films, DJ’d fashion shows, designed sounds for robots, and remixed songs for the likes of Lykke Li and Adele. But in recent years, he’s been making music with plants. “Life has all these interesting rhythms and dynamics that you can use as an artist if you just have the means to tap into them,” says Laposky, who uses biodata to create sound installations, musical recordings, and live performances. He’s tuned in to plants in Iceland, Palestine, and Paris, and he’s livestreamed trees in his home base of Cambridge for his public art project Hidden Life Radio. He’s performed in art spaces like the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where he’s been one of the local creatives featured in the Neighborhood Salon Luminaries program. And in collaboration with Charles Copley, he releases New Age folk under the moniker Palm Reading, combining electronic music generated from site-specific biodata with ambient field recordings and Copley’s acoustic guitar accompaniment. Their most recent album is based on recordings at Walden Pond, where the wild blueberries weren’t yet ripe but were up for a jam session. I spoke with Laposky to learn more about that album and his wider practice—including an upcoming project that’ll have him tapping Thai basil to create a recipe and a requiem.
The following conversation has been edited and condensed.
Jacqueline Houton: I’d love to start by talking about biodata sonification. How did you start listening to plants?
Skooby Laposky: I learned about biodata sonification over eight years ago. I had funded a couple of projects on Kickstarter, so I got an alert that there was this device coming out from a small artist collective in Philadelphia called Data Garden. They were trying to get this device to artists and musicians. It sounded interesting to have a new tool in my studio to help me generate ideas. I’ve been a plant parent for a long time, so I’m like, “Oh, I can hook up to my house plants and see what they can create.”
Of course, with Kickstarter, it’s usually not what’s promised that arrives on your doorstep. Originally it was supposed to come in bioplastic made of corn. The version they sent was in a laser-cut cardboard enclosure—this little cardboard box with a circuit board in it—and I didn’t think that would be the most robust thing to take out into the wild. So I asked them if I could send back this final version and instead get their developer’s kit, which was basically a baggie of electronic components and the schematic to solder it all together. When I got the components, I realized I hadn’t soldered anything since I was twelve—I used to put together little kits from Radio Shack. So I jumped back into soldering and circuits and then learned how to code it. As my ideas evolved, I was able to really get in there and customize it.
JH: When did you start bringing the device out of the studio?
SL: I had an opportunity a year after I initially assembled the circuit. I had experimented a little in my studio but shelved it because I was busy with other projects. Then the Gardner Museum invited me to do a performance. They were looking for an artist working between sound art and music, and I was recommended for this performance that would happen in the courtyard. Taking my sonification system out of the studio and connecting to plants I didn’t have any control over was when things got interesting. It made me start thinking about recording in other locations, seeing what the plants sounded like, and then improvising, doing this live mix of different instruments triggered by the biodata. That was the start of traveling around the world recording in different climates and locations.
JH: Can you explain how your gear works and what data it’s picking up on?
SL: When people are first learning about data sonification, my example is always the Geiger counter, which is a sonification device that translates real-world data—radiation levels—into sound that has quite a bit of meaning. For the device I use, the biodata is the electrical activity happening in the plant. The amount of electrical activity changes based on whether it’s in a drought state, whether it’s photosynthesizing. Water is a big factor; a plant that’s in a drought state will give you little to no electrical activity. It’s still living, but the amount of activity is so low that the system doesn’t read and translate it.
JH: Tell me about Palm Reading. How did you end up recording at Walden Pond?
SL: The Palm Reading project started in February of 2020. I went to Los Angeles, where my partner Charlie lives and the label we’re signed to is based. The label’s idea was that we would travel around the world, and instead of releasing albums, we would release locations. So Palm Reading was in Hawaii in the rainforest: What does that sound like? We thought it made sense to start by going to California, into the wild, off grid, and record and see what it would sound like. Charlie and I have history writing commercial jingles and such for my sound design projects, but this was new for us. Charlie and I had never worked like that together, where he was listening to the plants in real time and then improvising on guitar, picking out melodies that they’re creating and then playing counter to them or playing in unison. So we recorded in February of 2020, and then of course, a month later, the world shut down with the pandemic.
Charlie is a Cambridge native, so he was able to sneak back to Massachusetts in the summer to see his family. So we were like, we should go to Walden—this place that has significance for so many people, especially people in Massachusetts and New England, but also on a much larger scale because everyone knows about Thoreau and the Walden writings. We went out there in the height of the summer and I guess the height of the pandemic as well. We figured, since we were outside, we could be close to each other recording. We were out there three separate times. Recording out in the wild, you never know what you’re going to get, so it’s always better to have as much material as you can. So we went through hours of material and then homed in on a solid forty to forty-five minutes of music that represents different parts of Walden and the different plants we listened to.
JH: Can you tell me about a favorite track or a plant that surprised you?
SL: We connected to a moccasin flower, also called a pink lady’s slipper. That generated some really beautiful music. Not super melodic, but it created some nice harmonies. Charlie’s playing is great on that. And then I really liked the track that we created by connecting to carpet moss. I’ve learned over the years that it’s not always the plant that is really beautiful or striking that gives you the best music. Sometimes it’s that little patch of carpet moss that’s in the understory, on the forest floor, just doing its thing.
JH: You’ve performed in a range of settings, including art spaces like the Gardner Museum and the MassArt Art Museum, and also collaborated with yoga instructors at MIT Open Space. How do you approach biodata sonification for live performance?
SL: Listening back to that very first Gardner performance, I realize that in some of those early choices, I was trying things out and learning in public—figuring out what sonic palette still represents the data but also makes for an interesting, listenable experience. I’m selecting instruments that I know will work well if there’s a lot of data, very little data, or maybe even no data. Normally as a sound designer, it’s all you. You’re at the keyboard—the QWERTY keyboard and the musical keyboard—and you’re inputting everything. But when you have this input that you don’t really have control over, you’re figuring out what you can do with all those wild card moments. It’s taken me several years to land on a methodology that works for different scenarios and that’s true to the process but also engaging for people.
I’m always thinking, “What’s the next step for my biodata sonification practice?” So I’ve been building different microphones that have different sensitivities. For the MassArt Art Museum performance, I made an insect terrarium that had live ants. And it had a geophone inserted into it that was reading the soil activity, which gets very textural, depending how much the insects are scurrying around doing their thing. Combining that sonification with the plant biodata was really interesting. It was another element related to natural activity, but it provided this other dynamic and texture to the listening experience. And then for the yoga experiences, the process is to pare down. I try to leave space for the instructors to lead the flow and then, during the savasana, for a dialogue between the sonification and the natural resonance of the singing bowls.
JH: When you mentioned input you don’t control and wild card moments, it reminded me that you’ve cited John Cage as an influence. Could you speak about that connection?
SL: I’ve loved Cage’s work and ideas since I was a grad student many years ago. There was a quote of his that always stuck with me. He was influenced by Zen Buddhism. I’m going to paraphrase it, but he said that the point of art is not to express your own feelings and emotions, but to imitate nature in her manner of operation. That idea always interested me—OK, how can I do that? So I thought of that Cage quote when I learned about the biodata sonification technology. Instead of imitating nature, what if I could just use nature as the foundation of my sound and music practice? That’s really opened up a lot of things for me. I provide enough of myself for the music and sound pieces to exist, but then leave as much of myself out of it as I can and let these natural processes—or I guess life—dictate what you hear as a listener.
JH: I’m always interested in hearing about people’s early influences. I know you grew up in Iowa. Can you tell me about where you grew up and your family and the role of art in your early life?
SL: My hometown is called Cherokee. It’s in northwest Iowa. And my mother was from Bangkok. I was even thinking about that today, how government policy or geopolitical conflicts shape people. I wouldn’t exist if the draft didn’t exist. My father was in the Air Force, and then he met my mother in Thailand, and they came back to Iowa to start their family in my town. It was just a small farming community. My son recently got into Stranger Things—there are so many similarities to the way I grew up in a small Midwestern town in the ’80s. I spent most of my time outside, building forts in the woods. But I always had a natural ability to draw. I always was drawing and really into fantasy and Dungeons & Dragons, so I was always drawing this fantasy world.
Growing up, I was aware of my great uncle Ben F. Laposky, who’s considered one of the first people to create electronic art. He was doing that in my hometown, so I would have interactions with him. He would come visit his nephew, my father, and he knew I was into art, so he would bring me art supplies. The local museum had a display of some of his electronic abstractions. So his work was a big influence on me. He was sort of this mad scientist. I would go visit him every so often, and his apartment would be full of this hand-built analog equipment. He reminded me of Doc Brown from Back to the Future. Not super sociable, but I could tell he was a brilliant man. So pursuing art at whatever cost was in the family history. My uncle Ben never married, and he dedicated all this time and his finances to pursuing this work. Now he’s revered as one of the early electronic art pioneers. And he was pretty much entirely self-funded. He didn’t have a university helping him fund his ideas. So he was a big influence. And I knew that pursuing art was my escape from rural Iowa and kind of abject poverty as well. Growing up, it was very difficult for my parents to provide for my brother and me. I knew that art was my superpower that was going to help me leave and pursue my dreams. I found it fascinating that my uncle Ben was able to pursue his ideas and get some level of recognition even during his lifetime.
JH: That’s a great segue because I had seen that you’re working on a book about him. Can you tell me about how you decided to do that and how it’s going?
SL: I got invited to give a talk on his life and work at a big modular synthesizer festival almost ten years ago. That was the start of going through all these materials that I have—images of his work and correspondence with important people at MIT around the inception of the Media Lab. And so I’m like, wow, I should formalize and collect all this material and create a chronology of his work. I’ve been working on it for years, and it’s a lot of retouching; there are probably hundreds of images that will be in the book. I’m hoping in the next eight months a rough draft will exist. My little sister is a graphic designer, so she’s volunteered to help me lay it all out and do all the typography.
JH: I understand you received an artist grant from the state’s AAPI Commission for another project related to your family history—a performance called Untitled 2025 (Recipe/Requiem/Remix) that will have you cooking a family recipe while creating music with a key ingredient, Thai basil. Can you tell me more about that?
SL: I’m always thinking about how plants function in people’s lives. My late mother always had a garden, and she came alive during the summer, probably because the weather was closer to what she knew when she lived in Thailand. She was able to grow all these Thai vegetables and herbs that weren’t available in Iowa in the ’80s and early ’90s. And the one constant was Thai basil, horapa.
I have a hydroponic garden in my studio, and I’ve been growing Thai basil for the last four or five years. I had the idea to use the basil a little bit like in the Félix González-Torres works where things are removed—you can take the papers or the candy to represent loss and time and all those things. So we’ll be picking the basil live from the plant and using that in the cooking until there’s no more basil left and hopefully everyone is fed, but then also having that connected to my sonification system and creating this requiem for my mom. As we’re cooking, people can have another sort of nourishment and listen to the sonification. They can have a space for reflection, contemplation, or maybe even honoring some people they’ve lost.
There was a retrospective of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s work at PS1 last year. He’s been a big influence and inspiration, especially being a Thai artist. It got me thinking about using the same kind of equipment he used and cooking this recipe and having this other layer where there’s a sound component. And last summer I met Daniel Pravit Fethke, a visiting artist at Ox-Bow School of Art, where I was teaching a Wild Sounds class. He’s also part Thai and he does cooking-related projects. He’s based in Brooklyn, so he’ll come to Boston and be the other chef during the performance. It’ll be the two of us manning the electric woks, cooking the food for everyone.
JH: That sounds like such a meaningful project. Is there anything else you’re working on now that you’re especially excited about?
SL: I’ve been building a lot of my own custom microphones and thinking about what parts of a microphone you can change to make them behave differently. Is there a way to make a giant microphone that picks up a lot of activity all at once? Or what happens if you use ten of the same microphones in the same area? I think a lot of great art involves scaling up or shrinking, changing the size or scope of things. I feel fortunate that I have this aptitude to know how to build stuff. The most feasible way to have ten of these microphones would be to build them myself. It’s always cheaper to DIY if you can. My 3D printer has been going nonstop.
