Planted In Front Of The TV

Here’s a provocative thought, and certainly one that hadn’t occurred to me,

So if your children are supposedly vegetating in front of the television when they watch it for hours, what happens when you show television to vegetables?

Jon Keats, a self-described experimental philosopher, has set up an exhibition in NYC purporting to explore just that question.

Man Down

He’s filmed a travelogue for plants consisting of the Italian sky, complete with jet contrails, and planted (so to speak) a bunch of houseplants in front of a TV running the clip in a loop.

Presumably he picked houseplants because normally they don’t get to travel, and he thought they would be most appreciative of his efforts.

He’s quite straightforward in describing this whole gig as a thought experiment.

What I’m always doing is trying to pose thought experiments in the old-fashioned philosophical way,” he said, “imagining from a radically different perspective circumstances that are very familiar to us, in order to make them unfamiliar and force us to start to pull them apart.

Jon is right when he says old-fashioned, because let’s face it, TV is so last century. We need to get these plants hooked up with on-line shopping and dating, email, and financial planning.

The good news is that if they have pre-existing medical conditions we won’t know what they are, so we can provide health insurance.

I’m assuming they will register to vote … you can probably guess with which party.

Enough said.