Final Project Process: Solar Powered House Plant Concept

Concept:

             The idea behind our project revolves around the human tendency to need to have control of our environment, for better or worse. We evolved to survive in this world as it has occurred naturally, and yet have an overwhelming impulse to distance ourselves from "nature" as much as possible,  surrounding ourselves only with that which we know has an intentional design. That's what we understand and what we trust: the man-made. We don't even really consider ourselves a part of "nature," anymore, which has become something of a novelty for most people. We visit "nature" on vacation, we reconstruct and design "nature" in parks for recreation- "nature" is a place to escape the "real world" where everyday life takes place. "Nature" is a distant concept, easy enough to justify destroying, easy enough to ignore. If we're not a part of nature, than does that make us unnatural? Supernatural? Deluded?
              Our goal with this project is to illustrate the absurdity of this perceived disembodiment of us as natural beings that don't belong to nature and trust only the constructed. We intend for this to manifest in the form of a solar-powered house plant.
              Outdoors in the woods, a shrub is indisputably natural. What is it when it's in a plastic pot in someone's kitchen, growing in chemically fertilized soil and soaking up government regulated tap water? What about lining the side of a house, in a bed of wood mulch being trimmed to an aesthetically pleasing shape once a month? If we can stop being natural by removing ourselves from "nature", do plants also? And at what point?
               But hey, why stop there; If we're already trying to cut ourselves out of nature, why deal with plants at all? We have access to all of the technology necessary to just create our own (at least regarding the purposes for which we use house-plants), so why not exercise and extend our inclination toward control and "improvement"? A decoration that absorbs sunlight to look beautiful; that's all a house-plant is to us isn't it? We can do that ourselves, and heck, why not make it extra bright, and extra colorful? Enhance, enhance, enhance!
               But this begs the question: What do we lose through our "improvement"? A plant is a living thing. It breathes, it grows, it dies. It can reproduce. It feeds vertebrates and invertebrates alike, and can provides shelter and shade. Would we exist without them? How do we dictate value for something like that? But we certainly do, and the value we assign really isn't very high.