<div dir="ltr"><div>Dear plant-inclined people,</div><div><br></div><div>To expand the discussion on plant-human interactions, I'd like to introduce the collaborative project PSX Consultancy as a case of an interdisciplinary art/science/design approach to the topic. You can find a lot of information about how we went about designing for the non-human Other on the project's page <a href="http://psx-consultancy.com/">http://psx-consultancy.com/</a> </div><div><br></div><div>Perhaps a bit about the back story: the PSX Consultancy was the result of the initiative of Jan Boelen, the curator of last year's Biennial of Industrial Design (BIO50) in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The 50-year anniversary of this event was commemorated by a novel approach to curating the biennial, intended to question the role and capacity of design to intervene and rethink societal practices beyond objects, which are most often the outcome of design processes.</div><div><br></div><div>120 people were selected and grouped under 11 topics, ours being Designing Life. The international, interdisciplinary team then had 6 months to conceive and realise a response to the umbrella topic, which you can imagine is a feat in itself, involving an incredible amount of coordination, negotiation and endless frustration with the low quality of Skype connections.</div><div><br></div><div>We challenged ourselves to attempt plant-centered design, the obvious obstacle being the difficulty of understanding what plants would want/need. Rather than trying to avoid anthropocentric projections we embraced the fallacy and posed the result as a humorous yet bio-logical extension of human cultural practices, bringing plant and human sexuality into proximity by playing with the symbolism and ubiquity of sex. </div><div><br></div><div>One of the fortunate albeit unexpected outcomes of the project was the ontological assessment of plant life we were inadvertently tackling through the practice, which we found hinges more on cultural context (eg eastern vs western philosophy) than professional background. The inclusive, animist eastern tradition facilitates a suspension of disbelief, a gentle antropomorphization of the plant, which easily overcomes their segregation; on the other hand, the western, Carthesian tradition with its rationalism and hierarchal principles struggles to spontaneously compare plants and humans as different equals, and hence humour plays an important role in conveying the premise.</div><div><br></div><div>I look forward to your comments and critique.</div><div><br></div><div>Best,</div><div>Špela</div><div><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">2015-06-15 5:54 GMT+02:00 Patrick Keilty <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:p.keilty@utoronto.ca" target="_blank">p.keilty@utoronto.ca</a>></span>:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br><div dir="ltr"><div>Thanks Alana for introducing your work last week. It raised some great questions, which I hope we address as the discussion progresses. Week three brings us two new guests, <span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px">Špela Petrič and </span><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px">Amanda White, with Dimitrios Stamatis, and Jasmina Weiss, who we introduced last week. </span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px">Looking forward to this week's discussion! </span></div><div><br></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px">Špela Petrič (SI), BSc, MA, PhD, is a </span><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px">Slovenian</span><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"> new media artist and scientific researcher currently based in Amsterdam, NL. Her artistic practice combines natural sciences, new media and performance. While working towards an egalitarian and critical discourse between the professional and public spheres, she tries to envision artistic experiments that produce questions relevant to anthropology, psychology, and philosophy. She extends her artistic research with art/sci workshops devoted to informing and sensitizing the interested public, particularly younger generations. In particular, she is interested in all aspects of anthropocentrism, the reconstruction and reappropriation of scientific knowledge in the context of cultural phenomena, living systems in connection to inanimate systems manifesting life-like properties, and terRabiology, an ontological view of the evolution and terraformative process on Earth. Her work has been shown at many festivals, exhibitions and educational events in Slovenia and around the world (Touch Me Festival (CRO), Pixxelpoint (IT), European Conference on Artificial Life (IT), Playaround (TW), Harvard (ZDA), Ars Electronica (AT), National Center for Biological Sciences (IN), HAIP (SI), Arscope (GER), Mutamorphosis (CZ), Galleries de la Reine (BE)…).</span><br style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px">Amanda White (CA) is a Toronto-based artist and a PhD student in Cultural Studies at Queen’s University. Her current practice-led research is a body of work investigating social and cultural imaginations of nature through a program of research and collaborative, participatory and interdisciplinary arts practices. With a particular interest in human-plant encounters and relationships, she explores ideas around interspecies exchange, permaculture, symbiosis, and the real vs. Imagined in nature. Recent exhibitions and projects include: The Neighborhood Spaces Residency Program (Windsor), Plug-In ICA (Winnipeg), ArtSci Salon (Toronto), the Ontario Science Centre, Grow-Op -The Culture of Landscape (Toronto), Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, and the thematic residency Food, Water, Life with Lucy and Jorge Orta at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Amanda received an MFA from the University of Windsor and a BFA from the Ontario College of Art and Design. Further info: </span><a href="http://amandawhite.com/" style="font-size:12.8000001907349px" target="_blank">amandawhite.com</a><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><br></span></div><div><br></div><br clear="all"><div><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><span></span><span></span>Patrick Keilty<div>Assistant Professor<br>Faculty of Information<br></div><div>Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies</div><div>University of Toronto</div><div><a href="http://www.patrickkeilty.com/" target="_blank">http://www.patrickkeilty.com/</a><br></div></div></div></div></div></div>
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