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

[Selmin Kara]

Thank you for the post, Yi; it's wonderful to hear more about your project!
I didn't intend to insist on "the idea of human perception as a reference
point for defining and categorizing nature" in my questioning. I was only
trying to respond to Patrick's comment about communication (who is the
receiver and what is being communicated, etc.) and the wording of your
project with references to things like "the language" of plants made me
think that perhaps you were trying to draw a parallelism between plant
behaviour or processes and human communicative systems. Hence my allusion
to anthropomorphizing but other than that, I am much more interested in the
shift towards a more complex understanding of the nonhuman too.

Selmin


On Fri, Jun 5, 2015 at 7:12 AM, Yi Zhou <yzhou.x at gmail.com> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Thanks Patrick, Natasha, and Selmin for such thoughtful questions to
> introduce this fascinating new field!
>
> Murat - you were reading my mind! I agree that it's curious that the
> discussion is revolving around the idea of human perception as a reference
> point for defining and categorizing nature and our recent project "The
> Language of Plants" (LoP) actually began as a critique to this very point!
> Jasmeen and I are both formally trained as landscape architects, though we
> very much disagree with the direction that the field of landscape (and
> design in general) has moved in the last 30~ years. "Sustainable design"
> exists as a small and highly specialized niche, but overall the focus has
> been on form, aesthetics, and the commoditization of "nature" as an idea of
> place and refuge and individual plant species as tools or props. Our
> objective was to shift this focus back onto the intrinsic ecological
> functions and relationships of an ecosystem as a whole and reconcile this
> reductionist view by engaging in a discussion that emphasized holism,
> complexity, and nuance.
>
> Though imperceptible to the human ear, plants are constantly emitting
> sounds due to the processes of transpiration and growth (Patrick - you were
> right in your guess!) From an anthropogenic perspective these sounds exist
> at the "ultrasonic" range, too quiet and too high a frequency for the human
> ear. To the plant, these are just the sounds of their ongoing biological
> process, so it's natural that these sounds differ based on species type,
> habitat preference, time of day, environmental conditions, and even whether
> the plant is growing in isolation or within a healthy vegetative community.
> In truth, though it was our art direction, we became mere translators over
> the course of our explorations, as we were able to unlock an entirely
> new biological language that had never been accessible, relatable, or even
> considered within our narrow anthropogenic terms of understanding and
> seeing the world. Our objective was ultimately successful too, as visitors
> to our exhibit were shocked to learn of this new reality and, in
> large, left with a new reverence for these intrinsic though
> unseen qualities and processes of plants.
>
> I think sound is an especially powerful medium to engage people with
> because it is so inherently tied to memory, identity, and agency. It's
> human instinct to anthropomorphize things when we are first connecting to
> them, however these views are a necessary launching point for developing a
> more nuanced relationship to plants and to the world around us.
>
> Yi
>
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