Learning About Plant Intelligence from a Flying Plum Tree: Music Recommenders and Posthuman User Experiences
Maliheh Ghajargar, Jeffrey Bardzell · 2022
Recommender Systems (RS) are used in many different applications such as ecommerce and for media streaming, including music. Recommenders not only help users discover new music, but they also help to create assemblages of songs into playlists. Intentionally or otherwise, playlists often manifest themes, that is, universal ideas that are expressed in particular songs, lyrics, or passages. In this paper we were interested to explore the capabilities of AI to introduce themes through generated playlists, them-selves seeded by the theme of plants. Taking a self-reflexive and user experience approach, we collaborated with AI to create four Plant Music playlists to subject ourselves to what came to refer to as a posthuman user experience.