<div dir="ltr"><div><div><div><div>Hi Johannes, In also tried the sites using Firefox. In my attempts, the language of plants site remained silent; but in the three video clips in the singing plants site I could hear the sounds.<br><br></div>Jo, I have a few questions. Watching/listening to your videos, a number of clearly distinguishable sounds: a humming sound (the most prevalent), clicking sounds (not as much but still prevalent), occasional chiming church bells like sound, occasional sounds of metallic hammer striking a metallic surface. I am sure there are other sounds that I missed. The sounds I listed belong to our world interfacing digitally with something belonging to the plants (in other words these sounds/singing belong to us/are our sounds interfacing with something else, presumably in/from the leaves. <br><br></div>A leaf is an analog concept. My question is this: what aspect(<b>s</b>) in the leaves is your software (a digital language) responding to? Is it a change of temperature or what? What is a ray (I think it is a term you use)? I do not think a software program can be open ended enough (at least, as far as I am aware, not in our day) to respond to such an abstraction.<br><br></div>Ciao,<br></div>Murat<br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 3:01 PM, Johannes Birringer <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:Johannes.Birringer@brunel.ac.uk" target="_blank">Johannes.Birringer@brunel.ac.uk</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br>
<br>
thank you all for an interesting start to a discussion<br>
(on plant / art) that took me by surprise...<br>
<br>
and as I am catching up on listening, to plants (not thinking of them at all as extraterrerestial<br>
not even in metaphor but as part and parcel of the life and the ecosystems i know and grew<br>
up to live) and growth, and to ideas debated so far here on language and sonification, may<br>
I express a small scepticism, merely regarding to what it is I listen to (or perceive)?<br>
<br>
And I just wondered whether others had a similar experience? I mean getting into an experience of<br>
the work offered by Jasmeen Bains and Yi Zhou (on the on hand), and Jo Simalaya Alcampo (on the other)?<br>
<br>
>From here, in mean my location and access to the work, I tried to watch & listen to <a href="http://studioforlandscapeculture.com/#The-Language-of-Plants" target="_blank">http://studioforlandscapeculture.com/#The-Language-of-Plants</a><br>
and my elderly Firefox is silent (no sound) but shows me the website graphics and text; my Safari browser shows me a blank white canvas<br>
and I hear an interesting kind of drone music; I listen for a while, then notice that I do not associate it with anything in<br>
particular (reminding me of Alvin Lucier inspired performance and dance experiments we did in Dresden in the 90s,<br>
attaching electrodes to us (limbic system) and translating brainwaves to a few 'notes" on the Midi scale until the sound of our brains started to bore us.<br>
Can you please tell us more about your audio synthesis design and programming, and what made<br>
you arrive at the this? (what values assigned to what numbers? I think Murat asked that question also) and how did you arrive at thinking of this as "plant language"?<br>
<br>
In the case of Jo Simalaya Alcampo's installation, I could not hear any voices or any singing, <a href="http://www.josimalaya.com/singing-plants.html" target="_blank">http://www.josimalaya.com/singing-plants.html</a><br>
and would have preferred to see a 'separate' installation of the work without the laughing and cavorting opening night audience at a group show<br>
- though of course it appears the work was not performed by you, Jo, but you invited your audience to "interact" with the plants.<br>
It appears that you do propose quite a claim for your plants (in your statement on the website), however, namely that they are/become bearers of something<br>
unbearable, witnesses of trauma?:<br>
<br>
>living plants [as] keepers of story, cultural history and memory. The intent is to reconstruct what has been lost and repressed through trauma: the unspeakable.><br>
<br>
may I suggest that this would put a heavy burden on any plant, not least on ones that are corralled as mediators of information programmed into an interactive interface?<br>
(and sited in an art gallery context quite at a distance to the context of your ancestors and family in the Philippines). Well, after experiencing your own installation<br>
in the gallery, how well did the plants "play" their part?<br>
<br>
<br>
regards<br>
Johannes Birringer<br>
<br>
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