I see this initiative as an experiment in what happens when plant humanities, artificial intelligence, and comparative literature are brought into deliberate friction. Working with my collaborator Dr. Ioana Clara Enescu from the Faculty of Letters, Transilvania University of Brașov, we brought together Hong Kong and Romanian students from different disciplines and cultural traditions to investigate how plants are imagined, narrated, and technologised. Rather than treating AI as a neutral productivity tool, the project positioned it as an object of inquiry: a medium through which students could test the limits of representation, voice, and non-human imagination.
The mixed teams of students designed speculative prototypes (e.g. chatbots and interactive zines to installations and simulations) that attempted to “speak as” plants through Chinese and Romanian literary and philosophical texts. Students formulated questions, engaged deeply with canonical and folk sources, and translated complex theoretical frameworks into material and digital artefacts. In doing so, they confronted the tensions between romanticising plant life, anthropomorphising it, and recognising the cultural and technological mediations that shape any attempt to render plants legible.
Ultimately, the project is about cultivating intellectual capacities for a supercomplex educational landscape: holding contradiction, working across epistemic differences, and making creative judgments under uncertainty. By foregrounding what AI flattens or cannot access, the collaboration reframed “failure” as insight and friction as pedagogy. It demonstrates how speculative, art-based research can become a powerful mode of knowledge production — one that invites students not simply to consume theory, but to materialise and contest it.
