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

Sun Jun 7 03:30:39 AEST 2015

"But I wonder, too, if we can truly understand the other, in its own terms,
as you suggest, and whether our desire to do so is not simply a symptom of
our own humanity. As you say, we are bound by our own humanity, and the
result will remain human. I wonder, then, what those boundaries mean for
trying to understand the nonhuman."

Hi Patrick,when I said "humanist" or "humanism" are ideological terms, I
meant that the terms come with their own (quite specific and historical)
sets of assumptions. "Extra-terrestial" is a term to break down those
assumptions. It may need to new understandings (necessarily ultimately
still human), new territories, a consciousness Rimbaud calls "l'autre,"
Ahab's subverting the prescribed purposes of his ship (to kill sperm whales
for their oil to light houses) for a different undefined purpose
(whiteness), an activity basically a-social but still human.

Ciao,
Murat

On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 11:30 AM, Patrick Keilty <p.keilty at utoronto.ca>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Murat, We're all pushing for a point of view that challenges the hegemony
> of liberal humanism. I certainly think a turn to the nonhuman is an
> excellent approach. Methodologically it's a major intervention. It raises a
> series of important questions, and I am always happy to gleefully engage
> those important questions. But I wonder, too, if we can truly understand
> the other, in its own terms, as you suggest, and whether our desire to do
> so is not simply a symptom of our own humanity. As you say, we are bound by
> our own humanity, and the result will remain human. I wonder, then, what
> those boundaries mean for trying to understand the nonhuman. Can it ever
> mean we access the nonhuman on its own terms? Does the plant "care" (so to
> speak) that we want to understand it? Or is this turn to the nonhuman still
> ultimately about humans/ humanity? Doesn't it speak more to our own wants,
> desire, needs? Does it/ can it speak to/ for/ with the plant? It's an
> ontological question. Perhaps the plant is totally subaltern?
>
> Patrick Keilty
> Assistant Professor
> Faculty of Information
> Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies
> University of Toronto
> http://www.patrickkeilty.com/
>
> On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 9:31 AM, Murat Nemet-Nejat <muratnn at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> 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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>>>
>>
>>
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