[-empyre-] Welcome to our June topic on -empyre: Plant Art and New Media

[Patrick Keilty]

Thank you Renate!

Welcome to June, 2015 on –empyre soft-skinned space: Plant Art and New Media

Moderated by Natasha Myers, Selmin Kara, and Patrick Keilty and with
invited discussants Jo Simalaya Alcampo, Jasmeen Bains, Alana Bartol, Laura
Cinti, Pei-Ying Lin, Špela Petrič, Dimitrios Stamatis, Jasmina Weiss,
Amanda White, and Yi Zhou

June 1 - 7: Week 1: Jasmeen Bains, Yi Zhou, and Jo Simalaya Alcampo

June 8 - 14: Week 2: Alana Bartol, Amanda White, and Pei-Ying Lin

June 15 - 21: Week 3: Špela Petrič, Dimitrios Stamatis, and Jasmina Weiss

June 22 - 28: Week 4: Laura Cinti

Welcome to the June discussion, “Plant Art and New Media”. A recent
efflorescence of artistic experimentation with plants in the realm of new
media is taking shape around a much broader turn to plants in science,
popular culture, philosophy, and anthropology. Artists are reaching into
the seemingly silent and static lives of plants with electronic, filmic,
and electro-acoustic technologies, exploring ways to bridge gaps between
human and nonhuman realms. Artists are engaging new media technologies to
investigate and alter plant behaviour, communication, responsivity and
movement, and to simulate natural processes. A wide range of artists and
researchers are turning their work around plant life, including sculptors,
performance artists, architects, media makers, creative coders,
metabolic/genetic engineers, transgenic artists, and generative designers.
Their experiments with sound, light, growth, and decay, for example,
encourage us to think about more than human perception, and the creative
entanglements between human and nonhuman, and organic and machinic life. As
wider philosophical interests in nature philosophies such as vitalism and
panpsychism are rekindled, these experiments are beginning to trace new
contours around the active, sensitive and sentient lives of plants.

Plant artists are working at the cusp of new media: sonifying plants to
amplify their muted registers and perform plant/human intimacies;
remediating plant life through forms of cultivation, and through filmic and
digital media; and developing forms of biomimicry that code the
morphogenesis of plants into 3D/4D printing technologies for digital
fabrication to generate plant-like forms and materials that inspire
fashion, wearables, architectural modeling, and animation.

In this discussion, we wish to explore:

*Why are plants so compelling to new media artists? Why this turn to plants
today?

*How do technological mediations in new media plant art make perceptible
the otherwise imperceptible (invisible or inaudible) nature of plant life,
and how in the process do these experiments transform our understandings of
plant life and behaviour?

*How do our interactions with plants through technologies of articulation,
cultivation, modification, mutation, and simulation deepen our
understanding of the imbrication of culture and nature?

*What is life becoming as artists redefine the vegetal as active,
perceptive and sentient?

*What are the peculiarities of plant life teaching those artists who work
with plants? How do plants change the ways these artists think about
design, perception, relationality, ecology, and the anthropocene?

TO MAKE A POST TO THE SUBSCRIPTION LIST USE:

<empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au>

TO ACCESS TEN YEARS WORTH OR ARCHIVES USE THIS URL:

http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/

TO ACCESS THE WEBSITE FROM THE CORNELL SERVER TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT EMPYRE
GO TO:

http://empyre.library.cornell.edu

Biographies:

Moderators:

Natasha Myers is Associate Professor of Anthropology at York University,
the Director of the Plant Studies Collaboratory, Convenor of the Politics
of Evidence Working Group, and co-organizer of Toronto's Technoscience
Salon. Her anthropological research examines forms of life in the arts and
biosciences. She is the author of Rendering Life Molecular: Models,
Modelers and Excitable Matter (Duke, 2015), and has published articles on
modes of embodiment, the senses, and affects in the life sciences in
differences, Social Studies of Science, Science Studies, and edited
volumes. Her recent research examines the arts and sciences of botanical
experimentation, the contours of the vegetal sensorium, and the affective
ecologies of plant/insect relations. Her new work tracks the formation and
propagation of plant publics as artists and scientists stage interventions
in sites like botanical gardens. Links to her research, research-creation
projects, and publications can be found at http://natashamyers.org

Selmin Kara is Assistant Professor of Film and New Media at OCAD
University. She has critical interests in digital aesthetics and tropes
related to the anthropocene and extinction in cinema as well as the use of
sound and new technologies in contemporary documentary. Selmin’s work has
appeared and is forthcoming in Studies in Documentary Film, Poiesis, the
Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, Music and Sound in
Nonfiction Film, Post-Cinema, and The Philosophy of Documentary Film. She
has recently co-edited a journal issue on documentary art activism and is
currently co-editing an anthology on emergent forms and genres in
contemporary documentary, to be published by Routledge in Fall 2015.

Patrick Keilty is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information at the
University of Toronto and Instructor in the Bonham Centre for Sexual
Diversity Studies there. Professor Keilty works at the intersection of
media studies, technology studies, and information studies. His primary
teaching and research field is digital culture, with a particular focus on
visual culture, new media art, metadata and database logic, database
cinema, pornography, gender, sexuality, race, and critical theory. His
monograph project, provisionally titled Database Desire, engages the
question of how our embodied engagements with labryinthine qualities of
database design mediate aesthetic objects and structure sexual desire in
ways that abound with expressive possibilities and new narrative and
temporal structures. Recently, he has published and presented his
SSHRC-funded research on a wide variety of topics, including embodiment and
technology, algorithmic display, the history of information retrieval,
technology and transformations of gendered labor, women in computing,
design and experience, compulsion and control, metadata and the creation of
fetishistic networks, and feminist and queer new media and technoscience
issues generally. More at http://www.patrickkeilty.com/.


Weekly Guests:


Jo SiMalaya Alcampo is an interdisciplinary artist who explores
cultural/body memory and the healing of intergenerational soul wounds
through community storytelling, installation-based art, and electroacoustic
soundscapes. Jo has exhibited internationally in festivals and galleries
including: A Space Gallery, FADO Performance Art Centre, The Images
Festival, InterAccess Electronic Media Arts Centre, Nuit Blanche-Toronto,
and Xpace Cultural Centre. Jo studied Integrated Media at OCADU. Advisors
in the Indigenous Visual Culture Program inspired Jo to reconnect with her
roots. Jo travelled to Baguio, Bontoc, and Sagada in the Cordillera
mountain region in the Philippines. She met with traditional teachers and
indigenous rights organizations to learn how to develop an ethical code of
conduct when integrating Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Practices within
an art practice.  One response to this ongoing inquiry is Singing Plants
Reconstruct Memory - an interactive installation in which living plants are
keepers of story, cultural history and memory.  When participants touch the
plants, they sing Hudhud chants of the Ifugao People, play instruments
indigenous to the Philippines, and tell a story of Paalaala/ Remembrance.
Website: www.singingplants.org

Jasmeen Bains is a landscape designer based in Seattle, Vancouver, and
Toronto. Her work focuses on the creation of resilient ecologies in the
urban realm. Yi Zhou is a landscape designer based in Toronto concerned
with creating ecologically appropriate rooftop landscapes. Jasmeen and Yi
belong to Studio for Landscape Culture, a research-based practice focused
on the connection between culture and ecology within the medium of the
landscape. Their recent work, the Language of Plants, creates a complete
acoustic encounter that aims to illuminate the nuances and complexities of
the black oak savannah ecosystem by making the unheard "voices" of its
vegetative community accessible to a human audience.

Alana Bartol an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and educator from
Windsor, Ontario. She is interested in ecology as a ‘life science’ that
interrogates relationships between place and self, nature and community.
Working in performance, video, drawing, installation, bioart, environmental
and community-engaged art, her collaborative and individual works explore
concepts of visibility and survival through our relationships with nature
and each other. Bartol holds an MFA from Wayne State University (Detroit),
where she developed and taught the first Performance Art course in the
Department of Art and received a Rumble Fellowship. Her work has been
presented and screened nationally and internationally including PlugIn
Institute of Contemporary Art (Winnipeg), Simultan Festival (Romania),
Museo de la Ciudad (Mexico) and Media City International Film Festival
(Windsor, ON). In 2015, she completed a six week residency with Lucy +
Jorge Orta at The Banff Centre where she developed several collaborative
works including The Banff Dream Experiment and Life in the Soil, with
artist Amanda White (Toronto). Current and upcoming exhibitions include
Bioart: Collaborating with Life at Karsh-Masson Gallery (Ottawa) and Far
Away So Close: Part III at Access Gallery(Vancouver). www.alanabartol.com

Laura Cinti is a research-based artist working with biology, co-founder and
co-director of C-LAB - a transdisciplinary bio art collective and
organisation. C-LAB has been invited to range of international conferences,
exhibitions and continues to contribute in publications to broker
discussions on the intersections of art and science. Laura has been
involved in art projects, exhibitions and workshops with support from the
European Commission, scientific institutes, pharmaceutical companies,
councils, universities, cultural institutes and commercial partners. Laura
has a PhD from UCL (Slade School of Fine Art in interdisciplinary capacity
with UCL Centre of Biomedical Imaging), a Masters in Interactive Media:
Critical Theory & Practice (Distinction) from Goldsmiths College,
University of London and BA (Hons) Fine Art (First Class) from University
of Hertfordshire.

Pei-Ying Lin is an artist, designer and programmer with an MA in design
interactions, Royal College of Art, and a BSc in life science, minor in
computer science and cultural studies from National Tsing Hua University,
Taiwan. Her main focus is on the combination of science and human society
through artistic methods. She currently runs a Taiwanese BioArt community
in Taiwan.

Špela Petrič, BSc, MA, PhD, is a Slovenian 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)…).

Dimitrios Stamatis is a designer with a formal background in Product /
Graphic design. He has worked in Athens (Greece), London (UK) and Hangzhou
(China) designing products for a range of diverse industries. Currently he
is operating as a freelancer (leavenlab.com) exploring how design can
contribute as a catalyst for positive change. His main influences are:
design for social impact, the changing landscapes of post industrial
production, increased cross pollination of disciplines, future of digital
fabrication, human centered design / human behavior, inclusivity,
biologically informed design and open knowledge. Contact information:
dimitrios at leavenlab.com www.leavenlab.com

Jasmina Weiss is an interior designer and designer with formal background
in architecture / design. She has worked in different fields connected with
design, architecture and art. She has long been interested in different
fields of science, culture, psychology, biology, ecology and environment.

Amanda White 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: amandawhite.com

Patrick Keilty
Assistant Professor
Faculty of Information
Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies
University of Toronto
http://www.patrickkeilty.com/


On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 10:34 AM, Renate Terese Ferro <rferro at cornell.edu>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Welcome Natasha Myers and thank you for joining our -empyre moderating
> team members Selmin Kara, and Patrick Keilty for the June discussion on
> -empyre soft-skinned space,"Plant Art and New Media².  This
> cross-disciplinary topic will bring together those interested in art,
> science, popular culture, philosophy and anthropology to examine the
> dynamics between culture and nature.  We look forward to a topic that
> tests the grounds for discussions between human and nonhuman, and organic
> and machinic life. Natasha, Selmin and Patrick will be introducing this
> topic shortly as well as this month¹s guests but I did want to thank them
> for organizing the monthly topic. We all look forward to it.
>
> Happy June to all
> Renate
>
> Natasha Myers is Associate Professor of Anthropology at York University,
> the Director of the Plant Studies Collaboratory, Convenor of the Politics
> of Evidence Working Group, and co-organizer of Toronto's Technoscience
> Salon. Her anthropological research examines forms of life in the arts and
> biosciences. She is the author of Rendering Life Molecular: Models,
> Modelers and Excitable Matter (Duke, 2015), and has published articles on
> modes of embodiment, the senses, and affects in the life sciences
> indifferences, Social Studies of Science, Science Studies, and edited
> volumes. Her recent research examines the arts and sciences of botanical
> experimentation, the contours of the vegetal sensorium, and the affective
> ecologies of plant/insect relations. Her new work tracks the formation and
> propagation of plant publics as artists and scientists stage interventions
> in sites like botanical gardens. Links to her research, research-creation
> projects, and publications can be
>  found at http://natashamyers.org <http://natashamyers.org/>
>
> Selmin Kara is Assistant Professor of Film and New Media at OCAD
> University. She has critical interests in digital aesthetics and tropes
> related to the anthropocene and extinction in cinema as well as the use of
> sound and new technologies in contemporary documentary. Selmin¹s work has
> appeared and is forthcoming in Studies in Documentary Film, Poiesis,
>  the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, Music and Sound
> in Nonfiction Film, Post-Cinema, and The Philosophy of Documentary Film.
> She has recently co-edited a journal issue on documentary art activism and
> is currently co-editing an anthology on emergent forms and genres in
> contemporary documentary, to be published by Routledge in Fall 2015.
>
> Patrick Keilty is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information at the
> University of Toronto and Instructor in the Bonham Centre for Sexual
> Diversity Studies there. Professor Keilty works at the intersection of
> media studies, technology studies, and information studies. His primary
> teaching and research field is digital culture, with a particular focus on
> visual culture, new media art, metadata and database logic, database
> cinema, pornography, gender, sexuality, race, and critical theory. His
> monograph project, provisionally titled Database Desire, engages the
> question of how our embodied engagements with labyrinthine qualities of
> database design mediate aesthetic objects and structure sexual desire in
> ways that abound with expressive possibilities and new
> narrative and temporal structures. Recently, he has published and
> presented his SSHRC-funded research on a wide variety of topics, including
> embodiment and technology, algorithmic
> display, the history of information retrieval, technology and
> transformations of gendered labor, women in computing, design
>  and experience, compulsion and control, metadata and the creation of
> fetishistic networks, and feminist and queer new media and technoscience
> issues generally. More at http://www.patrickkeilty.com/.
>
> Renate Ferro
> Visiting Assistant Professor of Art,Cornell University
> Department of Art, Tjaden Hall Office:  306
> Ithaca, NY  14853
> Email:   <rferro at cornell.edu <mailto:rtf9 at cornell.edu>>
> URL:  http://www.renateferro.net <http://www.renateferro.net/>
>       http://www.privatesecretspubliclies.net
> <http://www.privatesecretspubliclies.net/>
> Lab:  http://www.tinkerfactory.net <http://www.tinkerfactory.net/>
>
> Managing Co-moderator of -empyre- soft skinned space
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu/
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20150601/16607f74/attachment.html>