Signals of Care: Following the Relationships between Plants, Plant Sensors and their Data Scientists

This paper examines the relationships between data scientists and
horticultural plants, mediated by plant sensors. An emerging area of
agricultural technology, plant sensors and the models developed by data
scientists to interpret plant signals may seem remote from care and affective
work. Yet, I followed the development of a relationship between a data
scientist and "their" trees. Their relationship evolves at a distance, with
infrequent physical visits. It is also mediated by a large sociotechnical
apparatus composed of data, maps, graphs, numbers, and other formalized
renderings of the plant's signals. While working on several different projects,
the data scientist regularly checks the condition of the trees. Frequently
concerned with the temperature levels surrounding the plants, for example, he
wonders if these are not too low or too high for their fragile stage of growth.
The argument is quite classical: even in the trenches of what is considered
the most advanced technological innovations, care and worries for "others"
persist (de la Bellacasa, 2011; Latimer and López Gómez, 2019). Prompted
by the call, I will ask some questions: while working with digital data implies
maintenance such as cleaning datasets (Boumans and Leonelli, 2020) or
looking for data gaps indicating sensors disconnections either from the trees
or the network that allows data transfer across geographic distances to the
data scientist's office - what does working from afar and from signal
representations imply in terms of being able to witness but not to intervene in
the maintenance/care of the device and the plants – and how does one
translate or differ from the other? In addition, what can be said symmetrically
about the plants helping the data scientist spend their days focused on a
computer? How do plants also help in maintaining their work and professional
identity (Archambault, 2016)? But also, how and when sensors reinstate or
blur the discontinuities between humans and non-humans (Latimer and Miele,
2013), and how are these constituted as human-non-human extensions of a
witnessing ability? Can we define a new category that transcends the
nature/technology binary in these plants-as-signals that appear on a computer
screen in an office? Can we describe it as a novel inter-techno-species
relationships that hold together entities that are usually ontologically
separated? Through this exploration of human-plant-technology relations, I
aim to contribute to discussions about new forms of care that emerge in highly
mediated technological environments.