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

[jsa]

In response to Murat's questions:  a) "The music the leaves play, the
sounds they make, are they programmed by you? Could you elaborate? Are
these sounds generated are by the leaves or programmed by you and go
through the leaves' mediation?"

> I have programmed the sounds.  During my research process, I travelled to
the Cordillera mountain region of the Philippines to meet with indigeneous
elders, scholars and what Katrin Guia names as "Culture Bearers".  My
purpose was to inquire how artists can incorporate an ethical code of
conduct when working with Indigeneous Knowledges Systems and Practices
(IKSP).

I was able to listen and get permission to make sound recordings of the
Hudhud, an epic chant sung by the Ifugao People to mark harvest season,
deaths, and other historical events. I also recorded indigenous instruments
made of brass and bamboo materials. Those are the sounds that play when
people reach out to the plants. This action is a metaphor for a
reconnection to our indigenous selves. Author and educator Lee Maracle of
the Sto:loh Nation, teaches that language and culture are never truly
lost.  We are simply disconnected.  One strategy is to learn the
socio-political reasons why we are disconnected then reach out with one
word, one vowel, one sound.

In response to b) "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.*"
In the case of people who when entering the room the plants immediately
start to sing, do plants stop singing when the same people leave the room?"

> Yes, in one instance I was showing the exhibition in a closed space at
OCADU.  I was standing a few feet away from the plants talking to a group
of students visiting for our annual graduate exhibition.  The plants were
not singing.

A woman entered the doorway, which was about 10 feet away from the plants,
and all the plants immediately started singing.  We all turned to her in
surprise.  She stepped backwards because she thought she was interrupting a
presentation, and the plants stopped singing.

I invited her inside the room.  She entered and the plants started singing
in response to her presence.  She seemed confused so I introduced myself
and explained my project.  She laughed and explained that she is a Reiki
practitioner who has developed her energy field to radiate widely outside
her body.  That is how she moves in the world.

This made me consider how plants may be able to radiate their field of
communication in ways that are invisible and inaudible to most people.

On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 1:58 PM, jsa <jo.simalaya at gmail.com> wrote:

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



-- 

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
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20150606/edd83091/attachment-0001.html>