[-empyre-] Week Three: Amanda White and Špela Petrič (with Dimitrios Stamatis, and Jasmina Weiss)

[Živa Pikaja]

Dear plant-inclined people,

To expand the discussion on plant-human interactions, I'd like to introduce
the collaborative project PSX Consultancy as a case of an interdisciplinary
art/science/design approach to the topic. You can find a lot of information
about how we went about designing for the non-human Other on the project's
page http://psx-consultancy.com/

Perhaps a bit about the back story: the PSX Consultancy was the result of
the initiative of Jan Boelen, the curator of last year's  Biennial of
Industrial Design (BIO50) in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The 50-year anniversary
of this event was commemorated by a novel approach to curating the
biennial, intended to question the role and capacity of design to intervene
and rethink societal practices beyond objects, which are most often the
outcome of design processes.

120 people were selected and grouped under 11 topics, ours being Designing
Life. The international, interdisciplinary team then had 6 months to
conceive and realise a response to the umbrella topic, which you can
imagine is a feat in itself, involving an incredible amount of
coordination, negotiation and endless frustration with the low quality of
Skype connections.

We challenged ourselves to attempt plant-centered design, the obvious
obstacle being the difficulty of understanding what plants would want/need.
Rather than trying to avoid anthropocentric projections we embraced the
fallacy and posed the result as a humorous yet bio-logical extension of
human cultural practices, bringing plant and human sexuality into proximity
by playing with the symbolism and ubiquity of sex.

One of the fortunate albeit unexpected outcomes of the project was the
ontological assessment of plant life we were inadvertently tackling through
the practice, which we found hinges more on cultural context (eg eastern vs
western philosophy) than professional background. The inclusive, animist
eastern tradition facilitates a suspension of disbelief, a gentle
antropomorphization of the plant, which easily overcomes their segregation;
on the other hand, the western, Carthesian tradition with its rationalism
and hierarchal principles struggles to spontaneously compare plants and
humans as different equals, and hence humour plays an important role in
conveying the premise.

I look forward to your comments and critique.

Best,
Špela


2015-06-15 5:54 GMT+02:00 Patrick Keilty <p.keilty at utoronto.ca>:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Thanks Alana for introducing your work last week. It raised some great
> questions, which I hope we address as the discussion progresses. Week three
> brings us two new guests, Špela Petrič and Amanda White, with Dimitrios
> Stamatis, and Jasmina Weiss, who we introduced last week.
>
> Looking forward to this week's discussion!
>
> Špela Petrič (SI), BSc, MA, PhD, is a Slovenian new media artist and
> scientific researcher currently based in Amsterdam, NL. Her artistic
> practice combines natural sciences, new media and performance. While
> working towards an egalitarian and critical discourse between the
> professional and public spheres, she tries to envision artistic experiments
> that produce questions relevant to anthropology, psychology, and
> philosophy. She extends her artistic research with art/sci workshops
> devoted to informing and sensitizing the interested public, particularly
> younger generations. In particular, she is interested in all aspects of
> anthropocentrism, the reconstruction and reappropriation of scientific
> knowledge in the context of cultural phenomena, living systems in
> connection to inanimate systems manifesting life-like properties, and
> terRabiology, an ontological view of the evolution and terraformative
> process on Earth. Her work has been shown at many festivals, exhibitions
> and educational events in Slovenia and around the world (Touch Me Festival
> (CRO), Pixxelpoint (IT), European Conference on Artificial Life (IT),
> Playaround (TW), Harvard (ZDA), Ars Electronica (AT), National Center for
> Biological Sciences (IN), HAIP (SI), Arscope (GER), Mutamorphosis (CZ),
> Galleries de la Reine (BE)…).
>
> Amanda White (CA) is a Toronto-based artist and a PhD student in Cultural
> Studies at Queen’s University. Her current practice-led research is a body
> of work investigating social and cultural imaginations of nature through a
> program of research and collaborative, participatory and interdisciplinary
> arts practices. With a particular interest in human-plant encounters and
> relationships, she explores ideas around interspecies exchange,
> permaculture, symbiosis, and the real vs. Imagined in nature. Recent
> exhibitions and projects include: The Neighborhood Spaces Residency Program
> (Windsor), Plug-In ICA (Winnipeg), ArtSci Salon (Toronto), the Ontario
> Science Centre, Grow-Op -The Culture of Landscape (Toronto), Scotiabank
> Nuit Blanche, and the thematic residency Food, Water, Life with Lucy and
> Jorge Orta at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Amanda received an MFA from
> the University of Windsor and a BFA from the Ontario College of Art and
> Design. Further info: amandawhite.com
>
>
> Patrick Keilty
> Assistant Professor
> Faculty of Information
> Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies
> University of Toronto
> http://www.patrickkeilty.com/
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
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