Sensing Bodies: Engaging Postcolonial Histories through More-than-Human Interactions

Sensing Bodies is an interactive installation that integrates plants, biosensors, and data displays in a series of tangible embodied encounters to facilitate reflection on the complex sociopolitical entanglements of plants. The triptych installation incorporates different forms of biodata and three plantation plants of the U.S. South to highlight reciprocal people-plant relationships while fostering a deeper sensibility toward colonial histories of local landscapes. In this paper, we put forth three design provocations for engaging with postcolonial perspectives in more-than-human interactions: materializing tensions to trouble multi-species relationships, embracing ambiguities and multiple relationalities, and highlighting geographic and cultural situatedness. In doing so, we contribute to how TEI might facilitate postcolonial understandings and sensibilities.


INTRODUCTION
More-than-human projects in HCI tackle important environmental problems by embracing non-human perspectives and multi-species collaborations in crafting sustainable futures.However, these projects do not usually engage with postcolonial histories or sociocultural specificities of non-human others [39].On the other hand, postcolonial work in HCI emphasizes the ongoing impacts of colonialism and histories of oppression on the design of technologies, but does not typically engage with more-than-human interactions.In Sensing Bodies, we bring together a postcolonial perspective on more-than-human design through tangible embodied interaction to highlight the intricate yet messy, intimate yet violent, ambivalent and contradictory relationships between people and plants.
Sensing Bodies is an interactive art installation triptych that integrates plants, biosensors, and LED data displays to reflect on people-plant relationships while cultivating a deeper sensibility toward the colonial past of local landscapes.In our discussion, we unpack how a critical engagement of historical perspectives on morethan-humans alongside intimate embodied interaction experiences can foster more nuanced understandings of complex multi-species relationships.
In our installation, we feature a selection of plantation plants, indigo, tobacco, and rice, from Georgia, U.S.A., where our exhibit took place.Alongside the displays, we present narratives of each plant to share their connections to violent colonial histories, such as chattel slavery, as well as their connections to indigenous knowledges and more sustainable land practices that preceded colonization.We further offer prompts that facilitate reflections during and after the interactions.This project highlights feminist and postcolonial theories that engage critically with the more-than-human to reflect on how sociopolitical systems have shaped and continue to shape our landscapes, environment, and relationships with non-human-others.Through Sensing Bodies, we ask the following research question: How can embodied interaction design help us reflect on more-than-human entanglements, including their social, political, and historical meanings?
We explore meanings through the concept of connectedness, as we connect experiences back to the self, including our own socio-cultural contexts [53].With this paper, we make the following contributions to the HCI and TEI communities: 1) We offer an empirical study of a TEI artifact that advances more-than-human design by highlighting the social and political dimensions of plants.2) We propose three design provocations for engaging with postcolonial perspectives in more-thanhuman interactions: materializing tensions to trouble multi-species relationships, embracing ambiguities and multiple relationalities, and highlighting geographic and cultural situatedness.3) We call for greater care in engaging with more-than-human narratives to recognize the colonial histories of violence that have rendered colonized peoples "less-than-human" [39] and constructed consequences that are deeply rooted in our landscapes.We suggest that postcolonial perspectives are an important and under-examined aspect of morethan-human scholarship that are critical for reorienting ethical responsibilities and working toward greater justice and sustainability.

RELATED WORK
Our work draws from the concept of "natureculture" to highlight the interwoven and co-constitutive relationships between human and more-than-human worlds.Many feminist scholars in Science and Technologies Studies (STS) have engaged with this concept through various themes, such as multispecies care [57], companion species [31], material interconnections and interchanges between human and non-human bodies [4], and collaborative survival with non-human species in the face of ecological collapse [50], among others.Relatedly, we also draw from posthumanist theory, a philosophical perspective that pushes against human exceptionalism to see people as entangled within complex more-than-human systems, including technologies and other organisms [11].Collectively, this body of work seeks to reveal and counter impacts of the Anthropocene, the current geological era where human actions have become a dominant force in shaping the Earth's ecosystems [16].
We specifically foreground non-western and Indigenous scholarship that have long engaged with nuanced and intimate ways of living with more-than-humans.For example, Kimmerer discusses the web of reciprocity between people and plants in indigenous land practices [42], and Liboiron describes colonialism as a set of land relations often overlooked or even reproduced in modern environmental projects [46].We also highlight critical race scholarship that calls for more-than-human research to recognize colonial and racial politics [17], including "the history of violent connections drawn between race and nature whereby certain groups were (and still are) considered less-than-human" [39, p2].These perspectives point to the importance of unpacking colonial histories in more-than-human narratives as a step toward building more equitable futures.
As such, we build on scholarship that engages with plants as entwined with settler-colonial histories.For example, Subramanium demonstrates how western scientific understandings of plants are shaped by colonial legacies [64].Foster discusses how plants can offer alternative ways of sensing, feeling, and being responsible while informing understandings of race and colonialism [24].In the context of the U.S. South, McKittrick writes about geographies of slavery in plantation landscapes that live on in the environment we presently inhabit [52].Accordingly, we center our more-than-human engagements on the concept of the Plantationocene [30], an alternative term to the Anthropocene that emphasizes how modern environmental problems, alongside inequities in contemporary social and spatial arrangements, are driven by a capitalist logic rooted in histories of racism built upon plantations [52], a place where plant and human bodies came into close contact in complex, violent, and ambivalent ways.We explore these questions through embodied interactions with three plants emblematic of plantation histories of Georgia, which we detail in the Design section.

HCI and More-Than-Human Interactions
In recent years, HCI has made a turn toward relational ontologies to trace out our intimate entanglements with non-human systems [26,35].Scholars increasingly frame "our relationships with technologies [as] entangled and the body [as] always more-than-human" [36, p1].HCI researchers have outlined new frameworks for designing technologies that focus on multi-species relationships for environmental sustainability [13,[48][49].Some use participatory design to foreground more-than-human agency [3,9,33].Others have applied these ideas in TEI artifacts to explore multi-species bodily entanglements such as through wearables [54] or intimate products [63].
Exhibit 1: Being with Indigo Exhibit 2: Feeling with Tobacco Exhibit 3: Breathng with Rice greater environmental sensibility, their agendas have been critiqued for flattening human differences [10], overlooking colonial histories [17], and universalizing relationships to non-human others without engaging with important social and cultural specificities [40].Post-anthropocentric HCI projects rarely emphasize the sociopolitical significance of more-than-human systems, i.e. their entanglement with racial histories and power structures, with a few exceptions (e.g., [10]).In contrast, postcolonial and decolonial HCI projects focus on disrupting dominant narratives, power structures, and western epistemologies embedded within technologies [5].Among others, these projects highlight Indigenous knowledge systems and techniques [2], sociotechnical practices of the Global South [45,62], and the cultural situatedness and "locatedness" of technologies [18,20], that is, how technologies and their practices mean different things in different places and times.For example, Martins and Oliveira discuss temporal strategies in decolonizing design practice, using ideas of timelessness and anachronism to blur the boundaries between past, present, and future [51].In the U.S., postcolonial HCI often engages with issues of race and racism in technological systems (e.g.[1,44]).Scholars also highlight intersectionality as a frame for understanding how interlocking systems of oppression and power dynamics shape experiences in sociotechnical contexts [19,21].However, this body of work has not typically engaged with more-than-human interactions.
In response, our project foregrounds a geographically and culturally situated reflection on colonial histories through tangible embodied interaction design with plants.We spotlight a selection of plants that represent the colonial pasts of the U.S. South.We highlight these plants and their relationships to histories of violence, dispossession, and slavery that took place on plantations in the state of Georgia.Through them, we seek to respond to Davis et al.'s call to bring more nuance and care to discussions of the Anthropocene and in unpacking racial politics in more-than-human narratives [17].Specifically, we draw from scholarship that decouples sensing technologies "from exclusively human orientations" [27, p20] to foreground biodata collaborations with non-human others [66].We build on work that moves away from instrumental and positivist uses of biodata toward feminist and critical visualizations that show our embodied integrity, social connections, and alternative ways of feeling (e.g.[37][38]55]).For example, Parvin and Atanasoski consider possibilities of sensing with trees that depart from the systems of control and extraction to elevate artistic engagements of multi-species collaborations that foreground the embodied knowledge of more-than-human others [56].
Scholars have also designed speculative artifacts that engage with more-than-human others through sensing technologies.For example, Liu et al. designed a suite of interactive wearable artifacts that incorporate sensing technologies as bodily extensions into the environment for mushroom foraging [47].Rolighed et al. designed an electronic device that uses EMG sensors to broadcast electrical signals of plants to reconfigure peopleplant relationships [58]; Asaf et al. designed a sensory enhancing plant stethoscope that allows children to "hear" plants [7]; and Angelini et al. used emotional biosensing to facilitate human-plant companionships [6].Related concepts are also seen in art installations, such as Frankjaer & Kitel's plant-controlled installation that change with environmental conditions and human interactions [25] and Triebus et al.'s performative installation that uses plants as an interface [65].We build on these projects to sense with plants as a way to think through their social and political histories.

Postcolonial / Decolonial HCI
As previously alluded to, there is a gap between morethan-human design and postcolonial scholarship in HCI.While more-than-human projects work toward reflection with the plants (see figure on page 4).We also use these interactions to invite reflections on the deeper histories embodied within these plantation plants.
To this end, we designed a printed paper booklet with historical details of the three plants that participants can read through to unearth their living connections to the history of slavery in Georgia.In the booklet, we highlight specific postcolonial perspectives and foreground the plants' ties to plantation capitalism as well as to Indigenous and non-western practices that preceded colonization.We intentionally chose to use this paper format to provide historical details instead of prompting information to appear on the display digitally through specific sensors or interactions.We felt that this format was less prescriptive and allowed participants to process the weighted histories on their own time and terms and in a more intimate manner while affording a non-linear way of engaging with the installation.We encouraged participants to interact with the plants before and after reading about their histories to reflect more deeply on the complexity in multispecies relationships.
We position our design within reflective design and critical design methods to call out assumptions on morethan-human relationships to foreground the politics of plants and foster engagement through inquiry [8,60].We also draw from Hartman, and later Rosner's critical fabulations, which highlights narrative potentials in reworking design legacies around historical absences to "open different understandings of the past" and create "new opportunities for a just future" [32,59, p17].Specifically, we resist contemporary design practices by: "creating alliances" (or composite, more-than-human relations); "recuperations" (or resurfacing forgotten colonial pasts); "interferences" (or disrupting dominant design narratives through the reimagination of biodata); and "extensions" (or resisting design solutionism by creating new circulations of sensing practices).By using critical fabulations to situate our work, we propose embodied ways of knowing that uncover understandings of the past that "reconfigure the present" and create new opportunities for reflection and reimagination [59].
with the plant in connection to slavery.Lastly, we pair an oxygen sensor with rice, as the shape and size of its grass blades encourages participants to breathe within the plant, representing a co-constitutive relationship that recalls pre-colonial pasts.We invite participants to connect with these plants through intimate interactions and through their biodata while also being with, feeling with, and breathing with their weighted pasts.
The sensors, LED lights, and two-way mirrors together create a human-plant interface that displays shifting perspectives based on the biodata input, or the embodied relationship between the person and plant.The perspective shift is achieved through the qualities of two-way mirrors that allows them to appear as mirrors on one side while permitting light to pass through from the other, depending on the lighting levels on each side.This design, developed by A1 and iterated with feedback from A2-A5, draws from the posthumanist concept of "becoming with", which erases categorical distinctions between humans and other species [11].Here, we blur bodily boundaries through the visual merging of one's

Exhibit 1: Being with Indigo
In the first exhibit, Being with Plants, participants are encouraged to approach the display and come within close proximity of indigo plants encased in plexiglass lined with two-way mirror film.To draw the participants toward the plant and its embodied history, a depth sensor is used to detect the distance of the person from the plant, which is reflected in the brightness of the LED lights, in which the lights get brighter as the person moves closer.This lighting effect creates a perspective shift that moves from the human self to the more-than-human other: as one walks toward the plant display, their view changes from their own reflection to a combined view of themselves and the plants, and, finally, to only the indigo plants enclosed within the lit display (see figure on page 4).Here, the participants can look closely at the brightly illuminated emerald green leaves of the indigo plants that call attention to the long and complex history of their cultivation for the alluring blue dye that contributed to the legalization of slavery in some Southern U.S. states, including Georgia [61].Indigo cultivation was labor-intensive, required significant expertise, and was made possible only through the labor and knowledge of enslaved Black and Indigenous peoples [22].Enslaved peoples on indigo plantations were often forced to work under unsanitary conditions in brick vats amidst the pungent smell of fermenting indigo plants and stagnant water that bred vector-borne diseases to produce indigo dyes for the British textile industry [41].This exhibit encourages participants to approach and be with the indigo plants, to look into their living green hues while reflecting on the different forms of violence and bodily entanglements with the plant throughout history for the production of its indigo blue dye.These include the invisible indigo "scars", or chemical injuries, that were endured by enslaved people as they harvested and processed the plant with extensive labor, which exceeded "the capacity of the human eye" [43].Being with Plants draws the participant's body and attention close to the plants and plantation histories to initiate a sequence of embodied encounters in the triptych.Racialized chattel were the capital that made capitalism.Africa was forced to share its social product-human beings-with the Atlantic slave system." -Françoise Vergès in "Racial Capitalocene" [67] LED s puls e with plan t elec trica l sign als tobacco plants EMG sensor Touching plant spikes signals, changing colors and brightness in LED display and still relies in part on exploitative labor today [23].Although tobacco plants were used for spiritual and medicinal purposes by various Indigenous peoples in the Americas [34], European colonization of the Americas led to its industrial scale production that relied on the violent plantation system.Plantation-scale harvesting and processing involves invasive and extended contact with tobacco sap under sweltering conditions that can lead to health hazards in tobacco field workers [15].As participants feel with the tobacco plant, they are encouraged to reflect on the various forms and scales of physical contact with the plant that different people experience or have had to endure.Through the interpretive visualization of plant electrical signals, the exhibit highlights the tobacco plant as a dynamic, pulsing, living body.Through the reciprocity of touch, the exhibit seeks to facilitate a reflection on how plants and people have shaped and continue to shape each other in complex ways, both biologically and socially.
"Many slaves advanced a theoretical and practical framework that guided human interaction with the nonhuman world toward fostering multispecies wellbeing.Its approach recognized social and ecological difference, how they were intimately intertwined and also mediated by various forms of social, ecological, and spiritual power."

Exhibit 3: Breathing with Rice
The third exhibit, Breathing with Plants, features rice plants that invite participants to breathe in their earthy scent and reflect on a way of relating to more-thanhumans that existed before colonial, capitalist forms of being.In this exhibit, an oxygen sensor is placed in the box, intermingled amongst the blades of rice grasses, capturing readings of atmospheric oxygen mixed with the plants' photosynthesis process.Oxygen readings are mapped to the hue of the LED lights, flowing down the strip light with each new reading.Participants are encouraged to open the front panel of the box and breathe with the rice plants as their slender blades move in response.When the box is opened, oxygen levels shift, triggering a slight change in the hue.When a human exhale is detected, a strip of rainbow colors appears on the LED lights from the drop in oxygen levels.The use of an environmental sensor as a measure of biodata further blurs bodily boundaries to foreground the plants, people, and their environment as co-constitutive.In a similar vein, the cultivation of rice itself also highlights intricate relationships between people, plants, and the landscape.Rice was first brought to the U.S. South by enslaved Africans from the West African coast, who also brought with them knowledge of cultivating and processing rice [14].Its cultivation was technical and required tacit knowledge of ecological practices.Through the act of breathing with rice, this exhibit captures the material co-constitution between people and plants, inviting a reflection on multi-species intelligence, intimacy, and interdependence that has been shared through non-western epistemologies, from which rice cultivation stems.
These three exhibits make a collective move toward using technologies to open up space for reflection and highlight more-than-human entanglement with different bodies, pasts and futures, intergenerational impacts, and beyond human timescales.They call for increased attention to postcolonial perspectives on these morethan-human relationships.We documented participant interactions, conversations and reactions through video and audio recordings.The recordings were transcribed and analyzed by A1.Alongside the audio transcription, A1 also documented non-verbal gestures and expressions of participants throughout.The annotated transcript and notecards were thematically analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis, which builds on traditional thematic analysis but emphasizes researchers' positionings and assumptions in the research process [12].As part of this reflexive approach, we acknowledge our subjectivities and share our positionalities as design scholars with a collective interest in social justice.Specifically, A1 is a student researcher with a background in landscape architecture whose work explores social and environmental justice through TEI.New to Georgia, A1 initiated this project as a way to learn about the local landscape and histories.In our analysis, we use an inductive procedure, focusing on how participants related, reacted, and interacted with the plants through the tangible design.A1 started by reading through the transcripts and highlighting key words or phrases, then combing through the transcript again multiple times, grouping and regrouping various codes to surface common themes.

FINDINGS
Thematic analysis revealed four main themes that reflect dynamic, shifting, complex, and contradictory feelings in participants as they engaged with the installation.

Fascination with Visible Embodied Connection
Upon initial interactions, most participants seemed captivated to see the display change with their gestures.Some participants gasped with surprise; others took out their phones to take photos.There was a sense of intrigue and awe that captured participants' attention upon seeing the lights change and their reflections shift as they interacted with the installation.One participant stated: "It was amazing how [

the plant] responded to my touching. It provides a closer relationship." Another exclaimed: "I love being able to sense my impact [by] breathing or touching [the plants]."
The combination of sensing technologies and LED data displays made it possible to visualize the dynamic processes of plants that shift with their environments, including the bodies of the interacting participants, calling attention to how our bodies are connected and affect one another.

Emotional Closeness and Reciprocity
After the initial fascination of seeing one's body connect with the plants through biodata, many participants also expressed a sense of closeness to the plants.Some participants felt connected to the plants through physical contact.For example, after breathing with rice, one participant expressed: "I like this one.There is a knee jerk impact.Because if I breathe in, I smell the plants, so they talk to me in a way that is surprising."This reaction shows that the participant experienced a sense of reciprocation and agency from the plants through the facilitated interactions, as if they were in conversation.In addition, embodied interactions that trigger changes in data displays sparked curiosity about different ways to interpret the data and the possibility of sharing emotions with plants.Several participants wondered if the plants could also sense their feelings.For example, after feeling the tobacco plant, one participant asked: "If I were sad would it be a different color?"Reactions like these suggest that the LED data displays opened possibilities of interpreting the meaning of the biodata and allowed for different ways of relating to plants that invited participants to reflect on their own feelings.Although the biosensors only capture physiological conditions of the two bodies, the intimacy of interacting with plants together with the visual and interpretive nature of the data display opened up space for emotional connections.

Participants learned about the plants by reading through out loud… looking at this plant I'm like, oh I love this plant, but I see tobacco and I'm like oh…(steps away).
It's just the politics of it…it's so different."Initially feeling a sense of affection toward the tobacco plant when feeling it, the participant's emotion shifted toward unease as she reflected on tobacco's plantation histories and exploitative practices of modern tobacco industries.These connections were surfaced after reading about the plants' histories in the paper booklets and not through interactions with the plants alone.However, it seemed that embodied interactions and connections with the plants before and/or after reading through their histories contributed to evoking these emotions and fostering more critical refections.

Introspections on Plants' Embodied Histories
After learning about the histories of these plantation plants, participants became more introspective, speculating on how the plants come to embody violent histories that continue to shape our environmental and social landscapes.After interacting with the exhibit, one participant pondered: "This makes me wonder if plants can hold memory of these histories and trauma of the writing reflections reading about histories At the site of the installation, participants engage with different forms of embodied interactions, relational experiences, and reflections.discussing experiences processing feelings interacting with plants the booklet or by conversing with facilitating authors as they interacted.Because these plants are common as everyday commodities, many participants felt an unexpected familiarity with them while noting the novelty in seeing their living forms up close.People found different connections to these plants based on their own experiences.Some participants were intrigued by seeing rice plants up close, as they felt familiar to it as a food.One participant from India connected with the colonial history of indigo plants, explaining how "India also has a complex history with indigo."This highlights the situated relationships to plants that varied for participants and how the experience of meaning inevitably connects back to the self, including our cultures, experiences, and values [53].It also emphasized that the histories of the plants were important in shaping how participants related to them.In some cases, there was also a notable sense of unease when learning about the plants' histories.This was at times noticeable through participants' changing facial expressions, demeanors when interacting with the plants, or through verbal expressions.For example, while looking at the tobacco plant, one participant stated: "I have to say this past."The participant reflected on the possibility that plants might retain histories of the land within their living tissues, and what it means to come into physical contact with this history.Several participants came to see the plants as witnesses of colonial violence against human and more-than-human others, as living bodies that not only sense their immediate environment but carry collective memories.One participant wrote: "All these past (and current) injustices live on in nature, the land remembers all."Through interactions with these plantation plants, participants were able to imagine them as more than biological beings, as a part of living landscapes carrying legacies of extractive practices that leave intergenerational impacts beyond human timescales.These reactions suggest that the coupling of written narratives of plantations with embodied interactions was able to provide a catalyst for meaningful reflections and discussions about important histories while adding nuance and depth to physical connections with the plants beyond measurable and visible biodata.

DISCUSSION: BETWEEN CONTRADICTIONS OF POSTCOLONIAL MORE-THAN-HUMAN DESIGN
Through Sensing Bodies, we presented a more-thanhuman design project that engages with the colonial history of plants and reflects on different forms of multi-species bodily entanglements through embodied interactions.We demonstrate an example of "staying with the trouble" [29] that embraces the messiness and discomfort of these entanglements, acknowledges the tensions between different ways of being and knowing, and recognizes that we cannot resolve these contradictions with simple solutions.In this section, we unpack the tensions in our design and study results.
Through this discussion, we seek to trouble the linearity of colonial thinking by foregrounding the complexity of multi-species encounters and embracing multiple simultaneous possibilities in relating to more-thanhuman others.We offer the following provocations for designing with more-than-humans to foreground their politics and tease out their colonial histories.

Materializing Tensions in More-than-Human Encounters
In designing more-than-human experiences, we call for foregrounding contrasting forms and conflicting meanings to trouble seemingly static relationships and linear temporalities and embrace being/feeling "in between" and "all at once."We highlight the juxtaposition of multiple perspectives and temporalities to acknowledge the messiness of more-than-human entanglements.
In our design, we incorporated different metaphors to highlight tensions in more-than-human relationships.At first sight, the box enclosing the plants spatially separates it from participants, evoking a feeling of isolation, objectification, and confinement that reflects colonial power and control over bodies of others, human bodies, land bodies, plant bodies or otherwise [46].When illuminated, the two-way mirrors create an illusion of an infinite landscape.The boundary is broken through openings in the boxes that allow participants to come into physical contact with the plant through different bodily senses, evoking a feeling of closeness at a distance.In the design, we juxtapose human control with more-thanhuman agency, construct boundaries that break down, and reveal both intimate and fraught connections with plants.One participant noted: "The mirrored plant cases with today's technology juxtaposed by the dark colonial history and its plant technology of the past are heavily charged to help the visitor embody the present, past, and future."The integration of sensing technologies with living plants that embody important histories disrupts the linearity of time to create a rupture between past and present.Our design elicited shifting and conflicting feelings with, through, and about plants that reveal simultaneous closeness and uneasiness, excitement, and introspection, highlighting more-than-human relationships as complicated and multi-dimensional.

Embracing Ambiguity and Multiple Relationalities
In

Highlighting Environmental & Cultural Situatedness
In designing more-than-human interactions, we call for an engagement with their situated environmental and cultural meanings.We highlight specific naturecultures to move away from homogenizing multi-species relationships and to bring more care and nuance in unpacking more-than-human narratives.
In our work, we foreground the environmental and cultural specificity of more-than-human narratives.We suggest that, when approached from a postcolonial perspective, plants embody a rootedness to place that presents unique opportunities to tackle entangled issues of colonial legacies, extractive histories, and nonwestern knowledge systems in our technological practices.In our design, we worked with specific plantation plants to unpack local landscape histories of Georgia and draw out concrete narratives of more-than-human entanglements, their social significance, and connections to larger systems of extraction.Our design uses mirrors to literally reflect the immediate environment, creating a setup and experience that is always different and connected to place.These specificities help to surface "the stories that haunt contemporary technoculturesthose stories lost to the present but still felt in abusive and extractive systems of power" [59, p81].Through these stories, we also highlight social differences and context specificity in more-than-human relationships.

LIMITATIONS & FUTURE WORK
In the course of designing and curating this project, we encountered unique challenges of designing with plants, which we briefly share here.First, we grappled with the extensive care essential for nurturing the plants.Unlike most digital projects, the plants' rootedness demanded caregivers to also be rooted in their locations.Their seasonality and environmental sensitivity also created uncertainties.As each plant was grown from seed by A1, there was even more unpredictability regarding their growth and survival.Nonetheless, this also fostered a deep (and ongoing) relationship rooted in rituals of care between A1 and the plants that was not represented through the exhibit itself.Further, while interfacing living materials with digital systems underscored the inherent situatedness of both, it also necessitated continuous monitoring and adjustments.Future work can be done to unpack the process of designing with plants and tease out these relational possibilities.
Additionally, we acknowledge the limitations of our study.Focused on observing participant interactions within a public installation setting, our data was limited in detail and specificity.This, at times, hindered our ability to conclusively establish causal relationships between the specific components of the technologies or the installation setup and the subsequent reactions and reflections of the participants.Future work could employ more in-depth interviews with participants to provide richer understanding of the human-plant interface.We also highlight the importance of extending the study to specifically engage with participants with personal connections to the colonial histories and local landscapes.

CONCLUSION
In this paper, we presented Sensing Bodies, an art installation that engages with the intricacies of peopleplant relationships through embodied interactions with three plantation plants.Each exhibit crafts intimate encounters with complex histories through material interactions to elicit tensions in more-than-human relationalities.Through biodata displays of bodily encounters, the installation foregrounds the embodied histories of more-than-human interactions in the U.S. South and facilitates reflections on different forms of bodily entanglements on plantation landscapes.Through this project, we call for postcolonial engagements in more-than-human design and offer design provocations for HCI and TEI scholars to consider to work toward greater care and justice for both human and more-thanhuman others.

Exhibit 1 :
Being with Plants Exhibit 2: Feeling with Plants Exhibit 3: Breathing with Plants -human other m o v i n g f r o m a n th ro poce n t r i c v i e w b lurrin g b o u n d a ri e s of self/ot h e r and b e c o m i n g w i t h p la n t s DESIGN Sensing Bodies consists of three exhibits: Being with Plants, Feeling with Plants, and Breathing with Plants.Each exhibit spotlights a specific plantation speciesindigo, tobacco, and rice, respectively.In the design, we place each plant in a plexiglass box lined with two-way mirrors on the front and back and LED strip lights along their sides, which illuminate the plants within when turned on (see figure above).We use different biosensors to capture the reciprocal relationships between the plant and interacting participant.We use LED lights to display the biodata representing the human-plant assemblage.We pair specific sensors with each plant based on their unique qualities to highlight sensory experiences through embodied connections.Specifically, we pair indigo plants with a depth sensor to juxtapose the interactive illumination of its leaves with its racialized history of plantation harvest for the extraction of the plant's dye.We pair tobacco with an EMG or touch sensor to juxtapose the soft texture of its leaves with labor intensive and violent histories of physical contact mirrors and LED lights create visual effects from biodata readings of various sensors that capture embodied interactions of people and plants.

Exhibit 2 :
shifting perspective from self to plant "Although indigo would not have remained on the hands of the slaves who worked the indigo processing plants, the indigo was still poisonous.The chemical elements that seeped into the pores of the enslaved contributed to slaves' deaths.More than metaphors, these indigo 'scars' indexed forms and orders of violence exceeding both the capacity of the human eye as well as traditional ideations of slavery as labor."-TiffanyKing in "The Labor of (Re)reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible(ly)" on Julie Dash's portrayal of indigo-stained hands in the film Daughters of the Dust[43] Feeling with TobaccoIn the second exhibit, Feeling with Plants, participants are invited to touch the soft, tender leaves of a tobacco plant and reflect on its connection to the living legacy of the plantation system that continues to shape our social, economic, and ecological landscapes.This exhibit includes a small side opening on the box that allows participants to feel the plant.An EMG sensor is attached to the tobacco leaves and captures electrical signals in the plant body, which are visualized in the hues of the LEDs lights that flutter continuously with the plants' pulses.When the plant is touched, electrical signals spike, changing the LED display to show brighter and more saturated colors that represent the connected plant/human assemblage.The embodied and reciprocal connection through physical touch probes an ambivalent multi-species intimacy that elicits a reflection on the labor-intensive and physically invasive cultivation of tobacco that expanded plantation slavery in America "To unpack the different levels of racialized environment we need to go back to the long sixteenth century, the era of Western "discoveries," of the first colonial empires, of genocides, of the slave trade and slavery, the modern world mobilized the work of commodified human beings and uncommodified extra-human nature in order to advance labor productivity within commodity production.
flow down lights exhale makes a rainbow Data display visualizes more-thanhuman co-constitution through the material exchange of breath brief history of each plantation plant in the context of the U.S. South quotes from Critical Race scholars to highlight postcolonial perspectives STUDY DESIGN We presented Sensing Bodies through a day-long facilitated public exhibition on Georgia Tech's campus, where we conducted an observational study of participants.The study was reviewed and approved by the IRB.At the site, we provided paper slips with prompts for reflection, encouraging participants to process and share their experiences.The prompts were intentionally open-ended to leave room for different feelings, questions, and speculations.During the exhibit, thirty-five participants engaged with the installation and fifteen left written reflections.