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

Sat Jun 6 23:31:35 AEST 2015

Hi Yi, thank you for your post. I am glad I won't be the only person
pushing that point of view. Exactly as you say, part of the purpose of
exploration needs to be a way of understanding the "other," truly other, in
its own terms. Such an approach would have conceptual, ethical, political,
therefore, artistic ramifications. Both your project and "the singing of
the plants" project seem to be along those lines.

Interestingly, in my long essay *The Peripheral Space of Photography *(which
emerged from a critic of the Metropolitan Museum's exhibition of the
Gillian collection on the first hundred years of photography *The Waking
Dream)* I make a similar argument. The essay starts with an attack on the
excessive "framing" of the photographs by the museum in the exhibition
which sees the photographs as aesthetics objects. That is the way the
majority of photographers  and critics saw them (particularly in France and
England, but not necessarily in the States) comparing photographs to
painting. My assertion in the essay is that photography is a new medium
very different from painting. Its heart is the dialogue between the viewer
of the photograph and what is before the lens,what I call the pose (the
pose can be human, animal, vegetal or mineral, it doesn't matter. They
create a unified field). The photographer himself/herself is less
important. The most potent spots in a photograph are often off the focus of
the lens, in a small detail, a mistake, etc. It's a very interesting essay
in my opinion and relevant to our present discussions (Green Integer Press,
USA, 2004).

Hi Patrick,

"...But isn't that goal ultimately a humanist one? For ultimately, aren't
we asking about our own subjectivity? Just trying to think this through...."

I am not sure I agree with you. As I said in my post to Yin, our purpose in
this discussion should not be human but extra-terrrestial. It is true that
finally we are bound by our own humanity, own language, etc. Ultimately,
the result will remain human. But I don't think humanist (or humanism) is
the same thing. It is a more ideological, therefore, already set, term.

Ciao,
Murat

On Fri, Jun 5, 2015 at 10:10 PM, Selmin Kara <selminkara at gmail.com> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 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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