The Grafting Parlour artists were initially inspired by Greek botanist Theodoros Orfanidis (1817-1886), who archived and displayed the many plants he discovered. Formed in Athens in 2008 through e-MobiLArt (European Mobile Lab for Interactive Media Artists) as part of its initiative for collaborative inquiry, the collective's creative research takes the form of live portals into the laboratory, video and audio collected from remote habitats, scientific residues and live experimentation.
The Grafting Parlour is a collective of artists and researchers who exchange and combine their methodologies through thoughtful experimentation. Through collaborative inquiry and shared research, GfP designs communications models for interacting with different living organisms. Research components include experiments for interacting with distant microorganisms and real-time interactions with varying views of the ecosystem, from the level of arctic bacteria to the broad sky above the Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory in Northern Finland.