Listening to the Virtual Greenhouse: Musics, Sounding, and Online Plantcare

Abstract

Abstract Plantcare is having a moment. Recent years have seen an outpouring of audiovisual content across several social media platforms, wherein humans film and photograph themselves taking care of houseplants. These self-proclaimed “plant moms” build community through their shared passion for caring for houseplants and showing this form of tree-hugging to a wider community. In this contribution, I theorize this plant-filled digital terrain as a virtual greenhouse, a space where humans can perform with and show off their collections of houseplants. This virtual greenhouse points to how plantcare becomes a space to play with expectations of humanness apart from human–animal boundaries. Furthermore, contrary to notions of plants as being silent or inaudible lifeforms, this virtual greenhouse is rich with music and sound. Following an exploration of the overarching features of plantcare content and other kinds of digital human–nonhuman representations, I describe how creators in the virtual greenhouse use ASMR-like techniques, acousmatic narration, and reinterpretations of popular music to make their intimate relationships with nonhuman life audible. This contribution demonstrates how these human–plant assemblages engage with a “back-to-nature” environmentalism and present opportunities to reframe human–nonhuman relationships through creative practice.