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

[Patrick Keilty]

Please welcome Jo SiMalaya Alcampo, Jasmeen Bains, and Yi Zhou as our
featured discussants for the first week of our discussion on "Plant Art and
New Media." We're looking forward to a dynamic and engaging conversation!

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.

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 10:42 AM, Patrick Keilty <p.keilty at utoronto.ca>
wrote:

> 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?
>
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> 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
>>
>
>
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