Eating Color
Color Perception in Plants
For experimental philosopher and artist Jonathon Keats — the world is a playground. Unbound by conventional thinking, he pushes at the limits of our experience by creating physical manifestations of imaginative thought experiments. Such experiments challenge us to consider and contemplate our world in a way that is both concrete and tangible, not detached and academic like most forms of philosophy. One of these experiments, the Photosynthetic Restaurant, is literally a “restaurant” for plants. We all know plants need light to survive. You could even say they “eat” light, as photosynthesis is the process whereby plants convert sunlight to energy and food. The Photosynthetic Restaurant is an attempt to play with this notion of light as food by exploring and imagining the different effects and possibilities of spectral light. To make his restaurant, Keats positioned a series of colored acrylic filters in the garden at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California. These transparent gels, mounted on copper poles, manipulated the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum the plants received throughout the day as the sun moved across the sky. In an interview in The Atlantic, Keats maintained that, “For nearly a half billion years, plants have subsisted on a diet of photons haphazardly served up by the sun and indiscriminately consumed, without the least thought given to culinary enjoyment.”
