[-empyre-] nature's reserved camouflage

[Živa Pikaja]

Indeed what Natasha brought to the discussion in her previous response
quite succinctly with her question/critique on interfaces, poses the
greatest challenge to the work involving plants. It's one thing to speak
about the realm of the alien Other from the posthuman perspective (Marder,
Hall, Bakke), but a wholly different matter to put the concepts of
inclusion into practice. As artists our greatest feat in regards to plants
is such: to approach a living being (usually under the extremely biased
comparison between "plants" and *Homo sapiens* -- that is the equivalent of
trying to compare *Escherichia coli* to "animals") that is perceived as the
backdrop, the scenery to our glorified existence and make it an equal, a
respected evolutionary alternative to the organisational principle we are
inherently biased towards (that is animals, mammals, primates).

In defence of the Plant Sex Consultancy: of course the project
instrumentalizes the plants. Within the per-version of sex toys lies a
critique of design which often bases its solutions on a survey, an attempt
to figure out what the client needs. By trying to design for the non-human
other, we assigned human value to an evolutionary process of speciation,
selection and extinction. Who is to say that a species losing their
co-evolved pollinator to extinction is a problem in need of solution? All
species alive today, regardless of their complexity, abundance or niche
specificity are equally successful.

Alas, we are dealing with a Western materialist Carthesian tradition and I
find that in many instances humour and absurdity communicates much better
with the audience than an enlightened stance that is easily associated with
new age spiritualism (I pointed out that Eastern philosophy implies a
fundamentally different way of communication).

The fact that the sex toys bridged human and plant realms was a successful
exercise that was catchy and yet augmented the perception that humans and
plants have nothing in common. The question was exactly this: why would you
make sex toys for plants?

That said, it turns out that (like most things) plants are continuously
changing and adapting; the fact that humans transplanted many species out
from their autochthonus environment or even inbred and selected them to the
extent they are effectively sterile poses a problem for their sexual
reproduction, which often relies on a specific pollinating partner. These
plants have not yet had the evolutionary time to adapt to the new
environment, so augmentations to bridge their innate preferences with the
available pollinators make sense.

Finally, I am currently pursuing the project "Confronting Vegetal
Otherness" where a series of performances investigates the
(in)compatibility of the human and vegetal world. With a performative
approach of juxtaposing plant and human principles I wish to point out that
the antropomorphic, empathic approach to plants has its limitations.
Respecting the differences might base our ethics towards plants much better
than than "elevating" plants to our perceptual milieu using time lapse or
electronic interfaces, through which their vitality is shadowed by the
mediation of the digital.

Best,
Špela




2015-06-17 18:47 GMT+02:00 Johannes Birringer <
Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk>:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
> dear all
>
> this is part 2; I am following up on a comment made by Murat
> after Patrick wrote:
> >
> what I was trying to ask is whether our turn to the nonhuman actually
> dislocates the human as the center of our inquiry. Or is a turn to the
> nonhuman just another symptom of the human? To Murat, I love
> the way this project challenges our current ideology (by altering our
> prevailing ideas about language and perception).
> >
>
> Murat then suggested (June 6):
> >
> when I said "humanist" or "humanism" are ideological terms, I meant that
> the terms come with their own (quite specific and historical) sets of
> assumptions. "Extra-terrestial" is a term to break down those assumptions.
> It may need to point to new understandings (necessarily ultimately still
> human), new territories, a consciousness Rimbaud calls "l'autre," Ahab's
> subverting the prescribed purposes of his ship (to kill sperm whales
> for their oil to light houses) for a different undefined purpose
> (whiteness), an activity basically a-social but still human.
> >
>
>
> Whereupon Amanda, at the beginning of the week (refering to text titled
> *Plants: The Ultimate Alien*) proposed:
> >>
> However, there are still great limitations to this [media "translations"
> of plants], 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 question the idea of translating plants.
>
> Thus I guess I am wondering what plant art does;  and i also would like to
> engage further, and take a closer look, at these ideas of the
> extraterrestrial (which as I mentioned earlier, makes no sense to me), the
> other, the ultimate other, the alien, etc.    I think Amanda wisely
> cautions us about the media applied to plants, and the capture and the
> usage.
>
> What is indeed interesting I suppose to philosophers who have engaged
> "Zoontologies" , animal-machines and plant-machines (Zoontologies is a book
> I found on my shelf edited by Cary Wolfe, for the Univ. of Minnesota Press
> in 2003, including a dense essay by Derrida from his lectures on "L'Animal
> autobiographique", entitled 'And Say the Animal Responded?') may well be
> the question of the other – what Murat calls l'autre. Yet Murat thinks, in
> one of his examples, that the fictional character of Melville's book on
> Moby Dick subverts the ideology of the whale ship by taking up a personal
> revenge?  Or is the whale, that strange "animot" (why can't Derrida not pun
> on words?)  enacting the revenge and responding, so to speak, to perverted
> ideology and capitalist industrial expropriation business?
>
> The animal, Derrida writes, does not know evil, lying, deceit. It may not
> have the "dansity" of feinte, tromperie, camouflage, pretense..... the
> capacity to pretend and deceive by a kind of dance, lure, or parade.
>
> And say the plant responded?
>
> have we not heard of biomimicry and camouflage amongst plants and
> animals?  and thus perhaps plants collaborate as well, react or respond,
> allowing us to ponder what the distinctions might be between reaction (as
> in on-off interactive systems) and response (as in responsive behavior and
> speech worlds?)
>
> (I was watching today, in the garden, for some time, the dance of a
> beautiful vigorous "bourdon" as it flew from tiny plant to tiny plant,
> balancing acts in a series of strange dances that delighted, steady rhythm,
> unperturbed by my presence, continuous, solid.  the bumble bees, I gather,
> tend to "visit the same patches of flowers every day, as long as they
> continue to find nectar and pollen there, a habit known as pollinator or
> flower constancy. While foraging, bumblebees can reach ground speeds of up
> to 15 metres per second (54 km/h). Biting open the stem of a flower...
> ...and using its tongue to drink the nectar a bumblebee is 'nectar robbing'
> a flower. Bumblebees use a combination of colour and spatial relationships
> to learn from which flowers to forage. They can also detect both the
> presence and the pattern of electric fields on flowers, which occur due to
> atmospheric electricity, and take a while to leak away into the ground.
> They use this information to find out if a flower has been recently visited
> by another bee......" (wikipedia).
>
> rather amazing, the more i read. in the garden, I got distracted by a more
> violent noise high above me in the old oak tree, two crows seemed to engage
> a mating ritual, I watched a rigorous flapping of wings and then only saw
> the motion of wings, high up, as branches and foliage seemed to be sprayed
> and scattered, amongst the shrieks of the ecstatic birds.
> The bourdon did not note any of this; and I cannot be sure what kind of
> dansity I witnessed above me, and on the ground level, where the tiny
> plants opened themselves to the robber, ever so gently.
>
> How then do plant scientists approach plants and humanists, Murat? And are
> sets of assumptions about plants changing (sets about otherness? about the
> code of the other?)
>
>
> regards
> Johannes Birringer
>
> _______________________________________________
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> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
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