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

Sun Jun 7 04:30:38 AEST 2015

Here is an email I wrote to a friend almost exactly two years ago (the
permission to share it given):

"In the last few months I have been working on the part to follow *The
Spiritual Life of Replicants* in my serial poem *The Structure of Escape*.
It's called “things.” I am beginning to realize two impulses are struggling
in this section. On the one hand, there is the extreme otherness, the
intractability of things, that is to say, what is beyond the human,
mineral, vegetal or even astronomical. This condition leads towards
silence. On the other hand, the struggle to comprehend this intractable
other requires a supreme, extreme act of empathy on the part of the human
mind. I realize that “things” will be the result of the struggle, the
meshing of these two opposing impulses—for which the synthesis is yet to be
discovered.

The infusion of the electronic medium in our lives --particularly through
the hand held tools, smart phones, etc.— is like the Catholic Church. In a
few years we will have a Protestant movement for a direct contact with god.

May 23, 2013"

Ciao,

Murat

On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 1:30 PM, Murat Nemet-Nejat <muratnn at gmail.com> wrote:

> "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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>>
>>
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