Nature is my Intelligence
Designing relations through scent, time and landscape.
Nature is my Intelligence is Eric Roux Reiffsteck's research and design project. Its method — Natural Intelligence — connects olfactory design, analytical chemistry and computational pattern recognition, asking how these practices might build new relations between humans, plants and landscape.
Here, intelligence names a design approach. The project does not depend on claims about plant consciousness. Its central concept is the state indicator: a plant's scent considered as a situated trace to investigate, with a place, a time and a context.
Begin with a place
"My starting point is the landscape I work with in the Landes, in Nouvelle-Aquitaine. As a paysan, perfumer and landscape designer, I want to bring field practice into conversation with chemical analysis and the experience of smell." — Eric Roux Reiffsteck
The proposed research focuses on Rosa canina, the dog rose, in hedges and woodland edges. It would follow changes across flowering, weather conditions, senescence and rose hips, recording the time, context and individual plant for each sample. Analytical feasibility and botanical identification are early questions to resolve.
The method
- Observe. Record the plant, place, time and conditions in a field journal.
- Sample. Plan repeated collections of airborne volatile compounds, with blanks and controlled sampling conditions.
- Analyse. Use chemical analysis to investigate sample composition and report identification uncertainty.
- Compare. Explore patterns across contexts and time. Computation supports comparison; interpretation remains accountable to the observations.
- Compose. Develop olfactory accords and an annotated route, making the boundary between analytical trace and creative interpretation visible.
The proposed technical workflow combines HS-SPME sampling, GC–MS analysis and exploratory pattern analysis. Access to equipment, sampling feasibility and identification standards must be established before results can be claimed.
An olfactory atlas of plant states
The proposed atlas would follow transitions — bud to bloom, dry conditions to after-rain, flowering to senescence — through three distinct layers:
- The living site: an encounter with the plant in its landscape.
- The analytical trace: the record of what was measured, including uncertainty.
- The olfactory interpretation: a perfumer's composition, identified as an interpretation.
The atlas is intended to make these layers comparable without making them interchangeable.
What would count as change?
The research would ask four questions. Can participants distinguish more than they could before? Can they tell measurement from interpretation? Has their attention to the living site changed, and how? Does that attention inform an actual decision about managing a hedge, an edge, mowing or access?
It also sets two explicit failure criteria:
"If a participant leaves believing that the plant spoke to them, the epistemic framing has failed."
"If a participant leaves feeling 'reconnected' without perceiving anything more than on arrival, the experience has succeeded and the research has failed." — from the Natural Intelligence corpus, §3.6
Next
The next step is to test what can be sampled reliably, establish the identity of the plants followed, and develop an evaluation that connects perception with real landscape decisions.