Seductive and eerie, "Vegetative States" is a collaboration between John Marriott and Steve Reinke in which director Marriott employs abstract video animations provided by Reinke as stimuli in an aesthetic experiment. This video begins as crisply shot evidence of a laboratory experiment in which a lush, potted plant is wired to a lie-detector device and is then shown art videos, while a technician monitors its responses. This attempt to influence and measure the plant's perceptions via Reinke's video art quickly morphs into a genre-blurring
deconstruction of point of view that lovingly distorts the boundaries between audience, experiment and spectacle while toying with the conventions of time-based media.