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<p class="MsoNormal">Hello everyone! </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style> </span>Thank you Patrick for your introduction, and to the moderators for
inviting me to this conversation, it’s been very interesting so far. </p><p class="MsoNormal"><br></p><p class="MsoNormal">A
short intro to my current work- In my work and research I am most interested in is re-situating
plants in our imaginations, to look at them instead of overlooking them, to
question our relationships with plants, imagine their ways of being instead of
taking it for granted as a lesser form. I see this as part of larger
conversations around ecology and -as someone stated earlier- part of the larger
project of de-centering the human. <br></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">My project titled Frugivore sent my work in this direction; for
this work I have been growing generations of tomato plants that I first
purchased from the grocery store, ate, deposited in my waste, collected, and
began to cultivate. The cycle is ongoing and I have now grown 3 generations of
these plants. A mutual biological relationship between the human body and
plants is illustrated in this work. (<a href="http://amandawhite.com/work#frugivore">http://amandawhite.com/work#frugivore</a>)
</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style> </span><span style> </span>Some of my other recent related work
includes setting up a community-based plant adoption agency, organizing urban
wild edibles walks and creating radio communication between indoor and outdoor
plants. Other ongoing collaborative projects include working with an architect to
design a greenhouse based on plant DNA, PARKhive- a mobile greenhouse and
archive investigating city parks in Toronto, and a long-term collaborative project
experimenting with translating plant bio-data to sounds. You can see
documentation of all of these projects on my website: <a href="http://amandawhite.com/">http://amandawhite.com/</a></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Alongside these projects, I have recently been reading a lot of science fiction
featuring plants monsters or sentient plants. In an article titled <i style>Plants: The Ultimate Alien</i>, Lynda H. Schneekloth writes that one of
the purposes of science fiction is to help us to define what is ‘us’ (meaning
human in this context) by showing us what is ‘not us’. In this way she
believes that plants are perhaps the “Ultimate Alien" because their ways of
being are so different from ours.<span style> </span>I
like this description, first because it sounds pretty badass, but also because
I feel that it nicely summarizes some of the issues we are tackling in this
conversation. No matter how hard we try to understand the language or ‘being’
of plants, the best we can do is try to translate this into our own favored sensing
mechanisms, such as hearing or sight. New media art and tech can offer something
of a translation by using things like biometric sensors or stop motion
technologies, methods that allow us to see, hear or translate some of the
processes of plants into something that makes sense to us and we can visualize
their data in a way. However, there are still great limitations to this, what I
mean by that is that we are really only talking about translating the processes
that have similarities to our own processes; for example plants are said to
have a highly developed method of chemical communication, but how can we even
capture let alone translate this data?<span style> </span>I
think that this is where art comes into the picture; that we are not trying to
produce scientific results, but engage with them, and with philosophy, with the
unknown-ness of plants, challenge our anthropomorphic, anthropocentric
tendencies and imagine what they are capable of.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I wonder what some of you might think of these ideas; For
example with the auditory projects we have been looking at, the plant sex
consultancy, or Graham- is this something you think about in your curatorial
work?<span style> </span>I also think about this in
relation to some of Alana’s work; she and I are collaborating on several
projects about soil at the moment, and we have been talking about the
relationship between different kinds of knowledge (for example western science, the spiritual), and how these sources can be integrated in artistic
practices in various interesting ways.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><br></p><br clear="all"></div><div><div><br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><font face="Arial" color="808080"><font face="Courier New"><font face="Arial"><font face="Arial Narrow" color="808080"><b><font size="3"><br>
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<div style="margin:0"><font face="Arial Narrow" color="808080" size="2"><span style="font-size:11pt"><font size="1"><span style="font-size:8pt">Amanda White | PhD <font color="808080">Student</font><br>
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<div style="margin:0"><font face="Arial Narrow" color="808080" size="2"><span style="font-size:11pt"><font size="1"><span style="font-size:8pt">Cultural Studies | Queen's University</span></font><font size="1"><span style="font-size:8pt"><br>
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<font face="Arial" color="808080"><font face="Helvetica" color="808080"><a href="http://www.amandawhite.com" target="_blank">amandawhite.com</a></font></font></div></div></div></div>
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