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

Mon Jun 8 10:55:02 AEST 2015

Thanks for your comments and questions.  Here are some responses:

1)  With regards to the sounds, when participants touch the plants, they
sing Hudhud chants of the Ifugao People, play indigenous instruments (made
of wood and metal), and tell a story of remembrance (via video projection.)

2) With regards to location, in particular the 'distance from the
Philippines', I have presented this installation in various settings over
the past five years, including solemnly quiet art galleries, at lively
festivals like Nuit Blanche in Toronto.

In 2012, I was honoured share my project at the University of the
Philippines (Baguio City) at the KAPWA-3 Conference that bridges indigenous
and academic cultural knowledge.

I shared the singing plants with Mr. Manuel Dulawan, a researcher and
traditional teacher with the Ifugao Academy.  He has devoted his life's
work to documenting epic chants  of his people (such as the Hudhud) from an
indigenous worldview.

2) With regards to the technology, sorry Murat, I am not sure what you mean
by "a ray".

The plants are connected to sensors using conductive thread, it is very
much like spider webs. The thread is wired to a circuit board installed
with capacitive touch sensors. The board is connected to a microcontroller.
Software is used to assign audio and video responses.

I think the plants respond to energy in our bodies. And water is an
excellent conductor of electricity/energy.

When I initially connected the sensors, I found that it was necessary to
touch the thread directly to trigger the audio and video.  However, I
discovered that over time, the conductivity had spread to the entire
plant.  Thus making the leaves, the entire trunk, and even the pot (which
had roots pressed against it) reactive to touch.

This process took different time periods for each plant ranging from hours
to days.

On Sun, Jun 7, 2015 at 10:27 AM, Murat Nemet-Nejat <muratnn at gmail.com>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 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
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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
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