Plants by Numbers Art, Computation, and Queer Feminist Technoscience, Dec 31, 2023
Utterly reliant on plants, humans are situated in a dependent, child-like relationship with them.... more Utterly reliant on plants, humans are situated in a dependent, child-like relationship with them. Plants make our food and our air and it has recently been discovered that they regularly form trade alliances and communications networks with fungi; yet, we continue to imagine ourselves as superior. The brain-less intelligence of plants is difficult to integrate with our current sense of self. As a method of learning from non-humans and attempting to understand – in an embodied way – how we might fit in, the author co-creates art installations that place the human as one actor among many. Practicing empathy, humility, and a culture of care, they embrace their role as a child of plants and invite others to play along. In one installation, Where Rocks are Fed to Trees, human participants perform as fungal particles traveling into a plant cell, re-enacting an ancient interspecies exchange of nutrients through mycorrhizal tunnels. In other ecosystem artworks, such as Machine Garden (with Ken Rinaldo), humans become entangled with live worms, plants, and electronics to make interdependent relationships visible and sensible in an everyday, domestic space. Technology is employed as an interface that helps tweak and re-program human understanding of self and other within the system. These projects operate as working prototypes for a future in which technology and non-human others are acknowledged and engaged as important actors in our shared world. Perhaps we will learn to grow beyond our immature, extractive relationships and eventually we will come to understand ourselves as obligate symbionts?
Uploads
Papers by Amy Youngs