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

[Murat Nemet-Nejat]

Hi Johannes, In also tried the sites using Firefox. In my attempts, the
language of plants site remained silent; but in the three video clips in
the singing plants site I could hear the sounds.

Jo, I have a few questions. Watching/listening to your videos, a number of
clearly distinguishable sounds: a humming sound (the most prevalent),
clicking sounds (not as much but still prevalent), occasional chiming
church bells like sound, occasional sounds of metallic hammer striking a
metallic surface. I am sure there are other sounds that I missed. The
sounds I listed belong to our world interfacing digitally with something
belonging to the plants (in other words these sounds/singing belong to
us/are our sounds interfacing with something else, presumably in/from the
leaves.

A leaf is an analog concept. My question is this: what aspect(*s*) in the
leaves is your software (a digital language) responding to? Is it a change
of temperature or what? What is a ray (I think it is a term you use)? I do
not think a software program can be open ended enough (at least, as far as
I am aware, not in our day) to respond to such an abstraction.

Ciao,
Murat

On Sat, Jun 6, 2015 at 3:01 PM, Johannes Birringer <
Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk> wrote:

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