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Artists and designers do not always use plants directly for expressing their ideas. Their various artistic approaches bridge the gap between different disciplines. In this chapter I will present artworks that holding a connection to plants, but stronger connections to other disciplines, like wearable technology, playful interfaces, generative art, robotic and bio art. This summary will outline their artistic expressions beyond a direct human plant interaction.

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During my research for my master thesis, I got some nice book recommendations about plants, nature, art and environment.

Natural artworks

These books provide a good overview how plants are used in Fine Arts over the last 100 years. Furthermore, it addresses and describes the environmental impacts of these design and art approaches. Pretty useful for an art history overview.

• [Bartel2001] Bartelsheim, Sabine. Pflanzenkunstwerke: Lebende Pflanzen in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts. Schreiber, 2001
• [Nemitz2000] Nemitz, Barbara. trans plant. Living Vegetation in Contemporary Art. Hatje Cantz, 2000
• [KastnerWallis2010] Kastner, Jeffrey; Wallis, Brian. Land and Environmental Art. Phaidon Press, 2010
• [WiMaMe2010] Witzgall, Susanne; Matzner, Florian; Meder, Iris. (Re)Designing Nature - Aktuelle Positionen der Naturgestaltung in Kunst und Landschaftsarchitektur. Hatje Cantz, 2010
• [Haeusler2015] Häusler, Minh. The Fusion of Flora and Art. Hirmer, 2015
• [Ost2015] Ost, Daniel. Der Meister der Blumenkunst. Elisabeth Sandmann Verlag, 2015
• [Wagener] Wagener, Klaus. Architektur und Pflanze: Interior design with plants. Verlag Eugen Ulmer, 2012
• Phaidon editors (2016). Plant: Exploring the Botanical World. Phaidon, 2016.

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A small summary of my Twitter messages from February 2013- June 2013:

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How I mentioned in my previous post, there is some stuff that I really like about developing with JavaScript. Especially, working with REST APIs and Backbone is so simple. There just a view steps to do. In my case I have chosen the Qype Rest API. Create your model and define your properties you want to work with.

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A small summary of my Twitter messages from July 2012- January 2013:

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Some time passed since this Adobe public relation dilemma about Flex and Flash happened. Honestly, it hit me very hard. Exactly at this time, I was diving deeper into the Flex 4 Component Framework and tried to adapt my new knowledge to Flex Mobile. After some failures and misunderstandings I was on a good way and I was convinced that the (new) Flex 4 Framework is a real step forward for developing User Interface. For this reason, I got a little bit mad about the whole discussion of HTML5 vs. Flex. I expected that HTML5 + CSS3 + JavaScript will come, but not so fast and powerful. However, I got a good opportunity and checked what it is all about this new hype of web technologies. As a Flex and Flash Develeoper the transition to this open standard development approach is not very difficult, except the tooling is like from another planet.  I had the feeling that finding the right tooling is as difficult as finding the appropriate life partner. There doesn't exist an one simple solution for everything like Flash Builder environment. In my case I recommend for writing Code to use the IDE Webstorm, for debugging I am using Firebug for Firefox. Whatever everyone has his own preferences, so decide for yourself what is the best.

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A small summary of my Twitter messages from February 2012- July 2012:

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A small summary of my Twitter messages from December 2011- February 2012:

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A couple of weeks ago I finished reading  the book "Developing Flex 4 Components" by Mike Jones. The reviews on Amazon.com were very promising and during my Flex 3 developing I always wished such a book. For this reason my expectations were very high.

I wasn't disappointed. The book is a perfect continuation of the Flex 4 beginner book "Flex 4 - Training from the source". Even it repeats some content like Data Binding and basics of developing custom compontents, it was enjoyable to read. Mike Jones has a really nice writing style for explaining the core concepts of the Flex 4 component and skinning architecture very easily. These chapters are really one of the best availabe informations to  these kind of topics. Completely new for me was the chapter about "working with Metadata". I learnt some deep concepts behind the Meta-tag usage of the Flex Framework. The same is valid for the "Distribution" part of the book. The development worklflow with Flash Library Project, Component Integraton in Flash Builder 4, and the Documentation part are very helpful for my future projects.

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A couple of weeks ago I read the book Flex 4 - Training from the source. It is the officially introduction book for Flex 4 from Adobe.  I was very curious about the book, because I started learning Flex 3 with no good start. For Flex 4 I wanted to learn it how I like to learn new things.

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