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

[jsa]

Happy June, everyone!  Thanks for starting off the discussion.  My
apologies for joining later in the week.  I started corresponding yesterday
with Murat on another thread, I'm now sharing on this thread.

I am an interdisciplinary artist who works with community stories,
interactive installations and soundscapes.  My ongoing project, "Singing
Plants Reconstruct Memory" involves three living banana leaf plants.  I
grew up in the Philippines and I remember these plants as towering over me
in my Lola's garden.  The ones I use in the installation are about 3" tall
and housed in individual pots.

The three plants can represent the traditional Western narrative of a
story: the beginning, middle, and ending.  They are also holders of
cultural and body memory.
Each plant has ruptures in the leaves created by a metal bottlecap to
represent "soul wounds" or missing parts of the narrative. Much of
Philippine history has been written by colonizers.  I am interested in
revisiting family and community stories as as step towards decolonization
and reindigenization.

In my installation, I suture the leaves with conductive thread that is
connected to an electronic grid with touch sensors.

When people reach out towards the plants, the electricity in our bodies
trigger the sensors and the plants sing, tell a story, or project images.

The living plants act as in intermediary between the human being and the
technology.  This has generated some interesting results:

1. The plants seem sensitive different people's energy.  Some people need
to actually touch the plant to make a connection; some can just hover above
the plant; some can just enter the room and the plants immediately start to
sing.

2. There have been times when no people are present and the plants trigger
each other to sing. This seems to indicate an ongoing "communication"
between plants that the sensors make "audible" to people.

3. The code I've written for the electronic grid is simple: touch = ON,
release = OFF.  However, the plants sometimes reverse the code.  They may
spontaneously start singing without pause, and require touch to stop.
Perhaps this is a way to draw people's attention?

4. When I water the plants with the sensors attached.  They all sing.  I
sing back.  It feels like a mutual exchange.

That is just a short introduction to my project and some observations.
Thank you for posting questions for us.  I will respond soon.

Thanks,
Jo


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
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> empyre forum
>>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
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>



-- 

Jo SiMalaya Alcampo

josimalaya.com



*UPCOMING:*

*Subtle Technologies Conference
<http://subtletechnologies.com/festival/festival-2015/>*

Sun May 31, 10AM-12PM, Panel Discussion at Artscape Youngplace



*LIFT OFF! Festival at Cahoots Theatre*

Fri June 19, 8 PM: free public reading of Hilot Means Healer

Sun Jun 21, 7 pm: Storytelling event, "Shaken Roots"



Asinabka Indigenous Arts Festival
<http://www.asinabkafestival.org/Home.html>

August 19 - 23, Exhibition at Gallery 101, Ottawa
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