[-empyre-] post for empyre

[amanda white]

Hello everyone!

 Thank you Patrick for your introduction, and to the moderators for
inviting me to this conversation, it’s been very interesting so far.


A short intro to my current work- In my work and research I am most
interested in is re-situating plants in our imaginations, to look at them
instead of overlooking them, to question our relationships with plants,
imagine their ways of being instead of taking it for granted as a lesser
form. I see this as part of larger conversations around ecology and -as
someone stated earlier- part of the larger project of de-centering the
human.

My project titled Frugivore sent my work in this direction; for this work I
have been growing generations of tomato plants that I first purchased from
the grocery store, ate, deposited in my waste, collected, and began to
cultivate. The cycle is ongoing and I have now grown 3 generations of these
plants. A mutual biological relationship between the human body and plants
is illustrated in this work. (http://amandawhite.com/work#frugivore)

  Some of my other recent related work includes setting up a
community-based plant adoption agency, organizing urban wild edibles walks
and creating radio communication between indoor and outdoor plants. Other
ongoing collaborative projects include working with an architect to design
a greenhouse based on plant DNA, PARKhive- a mobile greenhouse and archive
investigating city parks in Toronto, and a long-term collaborative project
experimenting with translating plant bio-data to sounds. You can see
documentation of all of these projects on my website:
http://amandawhite.com/


Alongside these projects, I have recently been reading a lot of science
fiction featuring plants monsters or sentient plants. In an article
titled *Plants:
The Ultimate Alien*, Lynda H. Schneekloth writes that one of the purposes
of science fiction is to help us to define what is ‘us’ (meaning human in
this context) by showing us what is ‘not us’. In this way she believes that
plants are perhaps the “Ultimate Alien" because their ways of being are so
different from ours.  I like this description, first because it sounds
pretty badass, but also because I feel that it nicely summarizes some of
the issues we are tackling in this conversation. No matter how hard we try
to understand the language or ‘being’ of plants, the best we can do is try
to translate this into our own favored sensing mechanisms, such as hearing
or sight.  New media art and tech can offer something of a translation by
using things like biometric sensors or stop motion technologies, methods
that allow us to see, hear or translate some of the processes of plants
into something that makes sense to us and we can visualize their data in a
way. However, there are still great limitations to this, what I mean by
that is that we are really only talking about translating the processes
that have similarities to our own processes; for example plants are said to
have a highly developed method of chemical communication, but how can we
even capture let alone translate this data?  I think that this is where art
comes into the picture; that we are not trying to produce scientific
results, but engage with them, and with philosophy, with the unknown-ness
of plants, challenge our anthropomorphic, anthropocentric tendencies and
imagine what they are capable of.

I wonder what some of you might think of these ideas; For example with the
auditory projects we have been looking at, the plant sex consultancy, or
Graham- is this something you think about in your curatorial work?  I also
think about this in relation to some of Alana’s work; she and I are
collaborating on several projects about soil at the moment, and we have
been talking about the relationship between different kinds of knowledge
(for example western science, the spiritual), and how these sources can be
integrated in artistic practices in various interesting ways.





-- 

 Amanda White | PhD Student
 Cultural Studies | Queen's University
 amandawhite.com <http://www.amandawhite.com>
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