Seems the Queensland state library hooked up a plant to a watering device, added in some electrical designs, threw in a bit of social media, and there they were.
Meet Eater, as the plant has come to be known, issued a call for fans and Wall posts on Facebook. Anytime someone went to the page and wrote something on the Meet Eater's Wall, the plant got a squirt of water.
Better yet (or worse yet, depending on how much you know the rest of the story), each time a person Liked the plant, the water rations went up.Well, the plant proved pretty popular and so many Likes made so much more water trickle into the plant's container and before you could say "Man the lifeboats," the plant was waterlogged. Library officials report that the plant has "died" twice.
Turns out you can get a lot of water if you get 5,000 Likes. Surely these people were thinking they were doing the right thing, giving water to what was surely a plant that needed some attention, other than the kind brought on by the apparatus invading the plant's container in the name of a social media experiment.
But the writing should have been on the Wall when the number of Likes started to skyrocket. Still, the people looking after the poor plant say it's all part of their experiment.
Also part of their experiment is the opportunity to get up close and personal with the plant. See, the plant is the real thing, not just some virtual center of attention. If you happen to be in the neighborhood of the Queensland state library (and you'd be in Australia, of course), you can stop in and give the plant some real-world TLC. Organizers of the project have set up certain sound effects to reflect activity, including a sort of crooning sound that results from contact between the plant and green thumbs and a full-on crying suite triggered by the plant's being abandoned for more than a certain amount of time.
Somewhere, Akihiro Yokoi is smiling.
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