[-empyre-] Plants, sounds, context-shifts

[Johannes Birringer]

thank you all for an interesting start to a discussion 
(on plant / art) that took me by surprise...

and as I am catching up on listening, to plants (not thinking of them at all as extraterrerestial
not even in metaphor but as part and parcel of the life and the ecosystems i know and grew
up to live) and growth,  and to ideas debated so far here on language and sonification, may
I express a small scepticism, merely regarding to what it is I listen to (or perceive)?  

And I just wondered whether others had a similar experience?  I mean getting into an experience of
the work offered by Jasmeen Bains and Yi Zhou (on the on hand), and Jo Simalaya Alcampo (on the other)?

>From here, in mean my location and access to the work, I tried to watch & listen to http://studioforlandscapeculture.com/#The-Language-of-Plants
and my elderly Firefox is silent (no sound) but shows me the website graphics and text; my Safari browser shows me a blank white canvas
and I hear an interesting kind of drone music; I listen for a while, then notice that I do not associate it with anything in
particular (reminding me of Alvin Lucier inspired performance and dance experiments we did in Dresden in the 90s,
attaching electrodes  to us (limbic system) and translating brainwaves to a few 'notes" on the Midi scale until the sound of our brains started to bore us.
Can you please tell us more about your audio synthesis design and programming, and what made
you arrive at the this? (what values assigned to what numbers? I think Murat asked that question also) and how did you arrive at thinking of this as "plant language"?

In the case of Jo Simalaya Alcampo's installation, I could not hear any voices or any singing, http://www.josimalaya.com/singing-plants.html
and would have preferred to see a 'separate' installation of the work without the laughing and cavorting opening night audience at a group show
 - though of course it appears the work was not performed by you, Jo, but you invited your audience to "interact" with the plants. 
It appears that you do propose quite a claim for your plants (in your statement on the website), however, namely that they are/become bearers of something
unbearable, witnesses of trauma?:

>living plants [as] keepers of story, cultural history and memory.  The intent is to reconstruct what has been lost and repressed through trauma: the unspeakable.>

may I suggest that this would put a heavy burden on any plant, not least on ones that are corralled as mediators of information programmed into an interactive interface?
(and sited in an art gallery context quite at a distance to the context of your ancestors and family in the Philippines). Well, after experiencing your own installation
in the gallery, how well did the plants "play" their part?


regards
Johannes Birringer