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to follow an invisible creek: in search of a decolonial soundwalk praxis

i begin with an acknowledgement of the myriad of organizers, scholars, artists, and teachers that have shaped and continue to shape the way that i think and write. Édouard Glissant, Christina Sharpe, Lucille Clifton, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Sylvia Wynter, Katherine McKittrick, Dionne Brand, June Jordan, and Audre Lorde. it is through their profound reflections on questions of Blackness, place, belonging, earth, and love, that i have found meaning in and context for what follows.

in the context of the rapid rise of big tech in san francisco, california, the perspective of land as perpetually exploitable is ever-present. tech-sponsored development projects are always framed by the city as being motivated by care and consideration for residents, and sometimes as being motivated by environmentalism.  in reality, the displacement and destruction that results from projects like these falls primarily on poor people of color, and their homes, gardens, businesses, community spaces, and schools. similarly, large-scale development projects more often than not have devastating impacts on the land – whether it’s the land that’s being built over or the sacrifice zone elsewhere. perhaps the electric cars of san francisco are thought to represent clean energy and a healthy modern city, but the manufacturing of these cars is predicated upon extensive mining and exploitative and extractive labor outside far outside the city’s borders. and these cars drive over flattened creeks and sand dunes turned to asphalt—through gentrified neighborhoods on stolen land of the Ramaytush Ohlone, people who are still alive and fighting for sovereignty on their traditional territory, and who remain stewards of the land.

these disparities are present in the sounds of the bay area. sound, quite literally, does not exist in a vacuum. the presence of sound thus implies the presence of something outside of that sound; in every sound we hear, there is also information about the context that surrounds it. and the sounds that we do hear say something about the value of the sounds that we don’t. however, i want to argue for a soundwalking praxis that does not settle for the sounds that most easily reach the ear, as in the freeway noise or the planes passing above or the white people on the street, but that reaches beyond to listen for the negative sonic space that is always present and creating itself in the spaces between what we perceive as audible. in my understanding, this is a practice of giving life to that which capitalism/white supremacy/colonialism renders dead, a practice of centering the life that is otherwise stepped on, forgotten, discarded, silenced. listening for the ecologies of the dispossessed. for proof of life, insisting. this is a decolonial soundwalk praxis.

Allie Martin describes “decolonial soundwalk praxis” as a way of listening that disrupts and disturbs dominant western understandings of sound and space, in “Hearing Change in the Chocolate City: Soundwalking as Black Feminist Method” (2019). to me, it also involves cultivating an embodied practice of centering that life which dominant pedagogies deem less than, exploitable, and extractable. in the specific geographies of the bay area, it has meant that my primary orientation while soundwalking has been to listen for the creek that runs through the land—even when the water runs dry, even when all we can see is an intersection.

following lobos creek, this and all remaining images by the author

the creeks i followed were mostly routed underground, culverted to run under parking lots, freeways, shopping malls, grocery stores, and other urban sites of development. the prioritizing of urban development/renewal/gentrification in the bay area over tending to the ecologies of its creeks points to the place that the land is seen to hold in so-called modern society: as a resource available to exploit as desired, as is convenient for the logistics of capitalist expansion and development. to listen in such a way, for the creek and for other forms of life forced underground and to the margins, requires methods perhaps alternative to the traditional soundwalk. we must renegotiate the categories of sound that are implied in western colonial pedagogies. we must reevaluate what constitutes a “creek sound” or a “nature sound” in the first place.

to listen for the creek when it is covered by concrete necessitates that we reach beyond thinking of a creek as something which exists in and of itself, in isolation.

∼∼∼might the sound of a creek be more than just trickling water falling through rocks? can it not be heard still in the place where it meets the ocean?∼∼∼

clip from lobos creek soundwalk, recorded at the point where the creek meets the pacific ocean.

∼∼∼or in the rustling of the trees who drink from the same groundwater?∼∼∼

clip from garden soundwalk, recorded at the head of the eggplant bed, by the marigolds, looking out at the southeast mulberry tree. strawberry creek runs alongside the garden and though it is in an underground tunnel, i like to think of it as feeding the plants.

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∼∼∼couldn’t a creek be heard in a voice that speaks of it, as in a prayer, or a promise, or a song?∼∼∼

clip from pinole creek soundwalk. a white man approaches me and talks about how sick pinole creek is, but he also says that he walks along it often.
clip from lobos creek soundwalk. Joel points out that lobos creek is visible. brushing past the foliage, i press my face against the fence that encloses it to get a look.

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if we understand space as relational, as Nigel Thrift offers in “Space: The Fundamental Stuff of Human Geography” (96), then perhaps we can reach an imagining of a creek as finding its life everywhere where water is sacred, running freely through the bodies of those that know it is there.

acknowledging the body as the point of contact between the self and the environment is an important part of a decolonial soundwalk praxis. “place is involved with embodiment” Thrift says (103), and in fact, when we truly acknowledge the body, the very boundary between the body and the environment begins to dissipate, because the body itself is constantly a part of place-making processes. if sound is a dimension through which we can understand place, then, similarly, listening for the life insisting in a place is not separate from listening for the people who are in relationship with it.

in my soundwalks, i leaned into the fact that i was experiencing every place principally through my body, and as i became more comfortable recording, i gave myself more permission to allow my experience to be subjective. what i realized is that my subjectivity, my specific presence to my body’s relationship with the places i was in, was an important orientation to be able to embody a decolonial soundwalk praxis – to be able to hear the sounds that otherwise may have been neglected.

∼∼∼while walking along lobos creek trail, for example, i noticed, growing out of the sand, plants that were familiar to me, that i had relationships with. the house finches were chirping, and my footsteps were clear∼∼∼

clip from lobos creek soundwalk, sounds of walking

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∼∼∼but the plants i recognized were not – could not be – audible to me until i spoke their names and touched their seed pods.∼∼∼

clip from lobos creek soundwalk, identifying the wild coastal lupine that grows near the water, and noticing that it had gone to seed.

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∼∼∼i pulled a few pods off a branch and holding them near the microphone i cracked them open, letting the seeds fall into my hands. i listened to the pods split down the middle and drop the seeds, and in their snapping i heard how much tension they were holding.∼∼∼

clip from lobos creek soundwalk, cracking open the seed pods

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i felt how much strain it must be to make and carry all those seeds, how much release it must be to crack open and spill out of yourself, and i was grateful to bear witness. i held the seeds in my hand and some time later, i gave them to the creek. in allowing myself the trust to follow my body’s intuitive relationship with the given place, i found sounds that i otherwise would not have heard. ultimately, i found a depth of connection to and intimacy with a place that before listening to in this way, i was a stranger to.

the work of giving attention to the sounds that go unheard is necessarily an embodied exercise. it demands relationship and it demands entanglement. it demands crawling inside a mossy culvert to hear the creek talk.

clip from bushy dell creek soundwalk

curious to hear how the creek sounded differently in the tunnel, i went off the trail at piedmont park to climb inside the section where the culvert begins. with the dripping, there was a nuance to its rhythm distinct from its sounds outside of the tunnel. i was able to hear, but only by coming inside and joining the creek. we sat there together, in the dark, for a while.

it also meant sawing down a 20-foot-tall agave in order to save the seeds after the 30-something-year-old plant finally bloomed—with bright yellow flowers on branches shaped like coral—and then began to dry out and lean precariously. to keep the other plants safe, and to release some pressure from the agave, we cut its stalk and from it saved its branches, seed pods, and seeds. the pods are now hanging around the garden at the Land of Disturbance and Defiance as art.

clip from cracking of pods audible in garden soundwalk

i am principally interested in sound because i am interested in love, and when i imagine a decolonial soundwalk praxis, intimacy is surely at the center. this perspective offers a way of learning place from the position of a being who is co-creating it – not as a scientist but as a steward. a decolonial soundwalk praxis complicates traditional soundwalking’s aversion to the body. we cannot exist separate from the sonic space around us anymore than we can exist separately from the ecologies woven into our lives. to touch is to alter, and so the work here is to lean into the inevitability of connection, the impossibility of objectivity. a decolonial soundwalk praxis rejects the extraction of sound as data, pushing us instead to open our bodies/hearts/minds to receive the sounds of a place as the place is receiving us. how might we use sound to remove ourselves from the perspective of the observer? and what kind of responsibility to place does this open up? if we are a part of the places we are in and listening to, then surely we owe them reciprocity, love, conversation, patience; we must listen as we would a relative, a lover, or a friend.

altar at the garden, image by author

i chose to record my final soundwalk at the garden on walnut and virginia street in berkeley, california, because it is a place that i know well and love dearly and i hoped to center that. the north side of the garden runs alongside strawberry creek.

rather than imposing a plan/route through the garden upon arriving, i allowed my relationship with the land to guide my movement through it. in my final mix, i layered pieces from this soundwalk together with selected excerpts from a meeting i attended with two fellow members of A.G.A.V.E., or Aspiring Gardeners Affirming Vibrant Ecologies (also Aspiring Gardeners Against Violent Extraction).in which we were trying to synthesize a manifesto using notes from previous conversations, itself a process of collective and layered creation. i chose to include portions of our conversation centered around ideas of relationship and care grounded in land, and i chose sounds from the walk that i feel hold in them intimacy and history:

∼∼∼the crows, who we feed every day and who plant seeds for us∼∼∼

clip from garden soundwalk

∼∼∼the lock, which only those who know the land can open∼∼∼

clip from garden soundwalk

∼∼∼and the marigolds, which we grow every year and which we harvest for offerings∼∼∼

clip from garden soundwalk

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these sounds are proof of relationship. small sounds that are easy enough to forget to hear, but that are important to remember – and so i try, as i would for an invisible creek.

if a decolonial soundwalk praxis is anything, it is that love is listening, and so, my promise to invisible creeks (and all quiet[ed] sounds) everywhere is to lean a little closer,

and feel your whisper on my neck,

and to listen well,

and to take notes,

and to remember,

and to conspire.

full lobos creek soundwalk.

Featured Image: “California Pepper Tree” by Flickr user baird, CC BY-SA 2.0

ameia camielle smith (they/she) is an aspiring gardener, dancer, and writer based in the san francisco bay area (Ohlone land). they are of mixed Afro-Indian ancestry and are greatly shaped by the seeds/shells/lives that exist at the intersection of these diasporas. ameia’s work is anchored in cultural ecologies and Black feminist geographies, and they are most inspired by stories of survival and collaboration between people and plants.

ameia received their B.A in geography from the university of california berkeley in may 2024. they are currently traveling through the southern united states where they are exploring maroon swamp geographies, tracing the steps of Zora Neale Hurston, and listening to the swampy cicada sounds of their childhood in north-central florida.

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El Caracol: A Stroll through Space and Time in Mexico City–Anthony Rasmussen

Sonic Connections: Listening for Indigenous Landscapes in Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles–Laura Sachiko Fugikawa

EPISODE 53: H. Cecilia Suhr’s “From Ancient Soul to Ether”

EPISODE 47: Finding the Lost Sounds of Kaibah–Marcella Ernest

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Botanical Rhythms: A Field Guide to Plant Music

Only overhead the sweet nightingale

Ever sang more sweet as the day might fail,

And snatches of its Elysian chant

Were mixed with the dreams of the Sensitive Plant

Percy Shelley, The Sensitive Plant, 1820

 

ROOT: Sounds from the Invisible Plant

Plants are the most abundant life form visible to us. Despite their ubiquitous presence, most of the times we still fail to notice them. The botanists James Wandersee and Elizabeth Schussler call it “plant blindness, an extremely prevalent condition characterized by the inability to see or notice the plants in one’s immediate environment. Mathew Hall, author of Plants as Persons, argues that our neglect towards plant life is partly influenced by the drive in Western thought towards separation, exclusion, and hierarchy. Our bias towards animals, or zoochauvinism–in particular toward large mammals with forward facing eyes–has been shown to have negative implications on funding towards plant conservation. Plants are as threatened as mammals according to Kew’s global assessment of the status of plant life known to science. Curriculum reforms to increase plant representation and engaging students in active learning and contact with local flora are some of the suggested measures to counter our plant blindness.

Participatory art including plants might help dissipate plants’ invisibility. Some authors argue that meaningful experiences involving a multiplicity of senses can potentially engage emotional responses and concern towards plants life. In this article, I map out a brief history of the different musical and sound art practices that incorporate plants and discuss the ethics of plant life as a performative participant.

 

 

STEM: Music to grow your plants by 

Flowers grow rhythmically.

Henry Turner Bailey, 1916

“Music for plants” is a small footnote in the history of recorded music. However, it perfectly mirrors many of the misconceptions and mainstream perceptions of plant life. By late 1950s, reports on the relationship between plants and music started to surface in popular culture and making the headlines of newspapers for the next decades: Flute Music ‘charms’ plants into growing bigger, better; Silly-looking plants that listen and really care, Drooping Plants Revived by Soothing East Indian Music. These experiments were later compiled and disseminated by the bestselling book The Secret Lives of Plants (1973) that furthered ideas of sentient plants that feel emotions and respond to human thought (what Cleve Backster called primary perception).

Cleve Backster - Primary Perception

Cleve Backster

The book reinforced the music-plant experiments of Dorothy Retallack, that famously claimed that plants exposed to classical and sitar music thrived in comparison to plants exposed to Led Zeppelin and Jimmy Hendrix’s acid rock. The scientific shortcomings of these experiments are well known. Daniel Chamovitz, author of What a Plant Knows, points out that Retallack’s experiments mainly provide a window into the cultural-political climate of the 1960s through the lens of a religious social conservative who believed that rock music was correlated with antisocial behavior among teenagers.  The alleged beneficial plant response to classical music was in many occasions used as an ideological device against youth culture.

Criticizing Music, Dr Max Rafferty, Effects of Rock Music on Plants

Musicians and record companies seized to entertain this new potted audience. Records to aid plant growth could be found in many florist stores in the US.  Their labels promised happy, healthy and fast growing plants with the help of classical and chamber music standards, electronic tunes, sine waves and spoken word. For instance, Molly Roth’s record Plant Talk (1976) gaudily speaks to several indoor plants (English Ivy, Fern, Philodendron…) while giving advice on plant care.

Molly Roth & Jim Bricker, Plant Talk/Sound Advice, 1976:

 

Dr. George Milstein’s record Music to Grow Plants (1970) uses high pitched tones under a Mantovani-esque orchestration to help improve the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the plants’ leaves. “The music is sugar coating for the vibrations” explains Milstein, “sound vibrations induce the stomata to remain open wider for longer periods, thus plants take in more nourishment and grow faster and sturdier.”

Dr. George Milstein, Music to Grow Plants, 1970:

 

Music to Grow Plants manifested the human perception of plants as passive and isolated recluses of indoor places. Some of these artists’ efforts came from the genuine struggle to grow plants in big metropolis. However, the veiled nature of plants became attached to personal narratives, tastes and social values. Plants were visible insofar as a canvas to anthropomorphic projections.

 

LEAF: Green Materialities and the Electrical Plant

Oats… the witching soul of music.

Kate Greenaway, The Language of Flowers, 1884

 

The sounding materiality of plants was appropriated by avant-garde practices interested in amplifying the noises of everyday life. The sounds produced by acts of physical contact with plants became a new ground for musical composition. Contact microphones attached to plants’ surfaces amplified their inaudible sonic proprieties. Two of John Cage’s percussion compositions Child of Tree (1975) and Branches (1976) call for amplified plant materials like cacti and rattles from a Poinciana tree. Plants provided the quality of chance and indeterminacy as they gradually deteriorate during the performance. The amplified cactus became an icon of indeterminacy music and keeps being plucked by many artists today like Jeph Jerman, So Percussion, Mark Andre, Adrienne Adar or Lindsey French. The Portuguese sound artist João Ricardo creates full soundscapes by conducting an orchestra of over twenty cacti (Cactus Workestra) performed by young students that follow his gestural directions on how to rhythmically pluck the cacti needles.

 

 

Creating music through touch and corporal proximity with plant life revitalizes human-plant relationships generating intimacy and knowledge. John Ryan poses the importance of “reaching out towards plants” to create experiences of embodied appreciation and connectivity. A close connection between body, plants and music can be found in leaf music (folded leaf whistle, gumleaf music) practiced by Australian Aboriginal societies who developed an acute ability to select and differentiate the sonic qualities of plant matter. The scholar Robin Ryan describes how leaf music is an intimate and vital part of Aboriginal societies to reflect upon the nonhuman world, as well as, a vehicle of attachment to local “music trees,” bushes, and plants. The Serbian film Unplugged (2013), directed by Mladen Kovacevic, follows two leaf players from rural eastern Serbia and an instrument builder trying to learn the art of leaf music. The simplicity of the leaf instrument deceives the extent of knowledge and practice necessary to master it.

 

 

Time and intimacy with plant matter are important components of leaf music. Artists like Annea Lockwood (Piano Transplants) and Ross Bolleter (Ruined Pianos) reversed the equation of the effects of music on plant growth and explored the effects of plant growth on musical instruments by abandoning pianos in outdoor fields and gardens. These works disregard human-time and tune in to plant-time. There’s a special acknowledgement of plant life in art works that tap into plants’ otherness.

Annea Lockwood - Piano Garden [1969-70] photo by Chris Ware

Annea Lockwood – Piano Garden [1969-70] photo by Chris Ware

In many music performances the role of the plant remains attached to an object-like position tied to the artist’s agenda. Musical practices using generative systems stemming from plants’ biological information attempt to take a step forward into the inner life of plants. Sensors attached to plants’ leaves detect bioelectrical potential changes originating from environmental variables like light, humidity, temperature and touch. These micro-electrical fluctuations are converted into MIDI signals that trigger notes and controls in synthesizers. The element of interactivity that these systems allow between public and plant via sound highlights in real time plant responses to sensorial stimuli. The Mexican artist Leslie Garcia sonically demonstrates the sensorial qualities of plants in her project Pulsu(m) Plantae (2012-13) and makes her software available for other artists to use. Similarly, the duo Scenocosme  creates interactive gardens where plants act as sensors to human touch generating cascades of sound. Creative chains linking plants, technology, music and touch can also be found in site-specific installations by Mileece and Miya Masaoka.

 

 

Plant-based generative music was pioneered by the British architect and artist John Lifton in the early 70s. Lifton created Green Music, an installation for 6 plants in an environmental chamber connected to an analogue computer and fed to a synthesizer. In 1976, the producers of the film-adaptation of Secret Life of Plants brought John Lifton to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park to collaborate with Richard Lowenberg, Tom Zahuanec, and Jim Wiseman. The group developed a several day media-performance with sonic translations of brain waves and muscle electrical potentials of 6 dancers mixed with plant-based generative music. The film features few sequences of this performance. However, we can get a better glimpse at Tom Zahuranec’s plant generative music in an interview by Charles Amirkhanian for a KPFA’s Radio Event. Particularly, we can hear audiences’ thoughts on plant life and how widespread were new age ideas of primary perception in plants.

 

Charles Amirkhanian & audience members react to Tom Zahuranec’s plant music, Radio Event No. 20, KPFA, 1972

 

These early experiments on generative music were a main influence on the artistic collective Data Garden, which has been releasing plant music and creating immersive audio environments controlled by plants since 2011. After a successful Kickstarter campaign, Data Garden launched a biofeedback kit, the MIDI Sprout, that allows users to easily derive music from plants’ electrical changes. Joe Patitucci, founder of Data Garden, says that since the campaign they have produced 800 units and have 400 users on their forum experimenting with the technology. In parallel, Patitucci has developed an online stream called Plants.fm that continuously broadcasts music generated by a snake plant and/or a philodendron. Data Garden has also released an app that allows users to plug the MIDI Sprout to the phone and hear their plants triggering the sounds designed by the developers.

 

Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, performance with MIDI Sprout, modular synthesizer and voice

 

These methods of generative composition are easing the way for users to creatively relate to plants. However, it’s vital that artists don’t reduce the diversity of plant life into a single aesthetic or into a “music of the spheres” representation. In this respect, the sound ecologist Michael Prime shatters the convention of assigning melodic sounds to plants by creating alien soundscapes generated from the electrical signals of hallucinogenic plants as heard in L-Fields and in One hour as a plant.

Beyond plants’ electrical responses, some artists are using alternative parameters to translate the life of plants into sound. For instance, Christine Ödlund collaborated with Ecological Chemistry Research Group in Stockholm to create an electro-acoustic composition accompanied by a score entitled Stress Call of the Stinging Nettle in which she transposes into tones the chemical signals released by a stinging nettle when attacked by a caterpillar and how the plant communicates with its nearby plant kin (the score can be seen in more detail here). The installation “Oxygen Flute,” created by Chris Chafe and Greg Niemeyer, reveals plant and human respiration through CO2 concertation readings in a chamber filled with bamboo. The fluctuation of CO2 inside the sealed chamber is translated into bamboo flute music fostering in the visitor a heightened perception of his own breath. The sonification of these hidden relationships between plant life and animal life call attention to larger concepts like the greenhouse effect or global warming in a very physical and emotional way. They make graspable what Timothy Morton calls hyperobjects – objects massively distributed in time and space that defy our perception and comprehension.

 

FOREST: Plant Bioacoustics and Acoustic Ecology

Sit by the trees – what kind of tree makes what kind of sound?

Pauline Oliveros, Country Meditations, 1988

 

One could argue that the only sound that is ecologically relevant is the sound of the plant itself. The realm of vibrations occurring on the plants’ surfaces that manifest the plant’s own agency and connectivity to its surroundings. In short, plant bioacoustics aims to study plants’ adaptive strategies that employ the use of sound. A common example is the process of buzz pollination in which plants only release pollen when vibrating at a specific frequency by pollinator bees. Plants can also respond selectively to the mechanical vibrations generated by the chewing of insect herbivores eliciting defensive chemical responses. A study by Monica Gagliano revealed that young roots of corn grow towards the source of continuous tones and respond optimally to frequencies of 200–300 Hz, which is within the frequency range of the clicking sounds the same roots emit themselves. Also, Gagliano and her team have recently shown that the roots of pea seedlings are able to locate water sources by sensing the vibrations generated by water moving. Gagliano has been one of the forefront voices advocating for the need of more research in plant bioacoustics to understand the ecological significance of sound in plants.

 

Slide29

 

So far, it is not completely clear how plants use “sound detection,” and if sounds are used as signal or are merely by-products of their physiology. Nevertheless, is important to recognize them. These sounds have been the focus of some practices that articulate artistic and scientific points of view. Inspired by Gagliano’s studies, Sebastian Frisch created the installation Biophonic Garden that recontextualizes a lab setting where a group of corn seedlings are suspended in a water tank that grow towards a constant sine tone of 220 Hertz. A set of headphones allows one to tune into the roots’ acoustic environment amplified by two hydrophones.

biophonic_garden_bg

Photo of Biophonic Garden, with Authorization by Sebastian Frisch

Zach Poff’s project Pond Station invites us to eavesdrop on the sounds of underwater plants of a small freshwater pond in Upstate New York. During an artistic residency at Wave Farm, Poff built a floating platform that operates from dawn to evening using solar-charged batteries. The Pond Station uses hydrophones to amplify the sounds of underwater life and broadcasts them via online web stream. The underwater soundscape goes through cyclical changes according to seasons and time of day. In the mornings, Poff describes a photosynthetic chorus of bubbling as plants begin to produce oxygen. Recently, an invasion of duckweed covered the surface of the freshwater pond affecting its soundscape. I asked Zach Poff about the sonic consequences of this invasion:

Duckweed taught me a lesson about biophony as an indicator of biodiversity. For an entire year I struggled with rebuilding hydrophones and upgrading electronics, trying to get back the poly-rhythmic diversity that I heard during the first year of listening. Then I realized that the duckweed could reduce oxygen levels enough to cause fish kills, and block sunlight from reaching other aquatic plants.

Pond Station in the Morning by Zach Poff, Reproduced with Authorization

Photo of Pond Station in the Morning by Zach Poff, Reproduced with Authorization

Poff finds a parallel between the lack of density and variety in the underwater soundscape of the pond and Bernie Krause’s recordings made in California’s Lincoln Meadow before and after selective logging occurred:

From a distance the visual field was unchanged but the biophony was basically gone after the logging. The pond duckweed looks like a benign blanket of green, but all that’s left of the sound is the slow bubbling that I attribute to decaying organics on the pond bottom. It’s jarring.

 

FRUIT: Plant Ethics and Speculative Botany

There are many ways to love a vegetable.

M.F.K. Fisher, How to cook a wolf, 1942

The sonification and acoustic amplification of plant life evoke both a sense of connection and the realization of an ontological fracture. The translation and artistic representation of plant otherness into sound or music brings ups vital ethical considerations. Michael Marder, author of Plant-Thinking, argues that techniques applied to plants to derive meaningful information from a human standpoint occlude the meaning of the plants themselves. Once we engage with the electronic menagerie, the plant starts to disappear. Alternative ways of thinking with and of being with plants are called upon by Marder, specifically, artistic practices that vibrate with the self-expressions of vegetal life. In Grafts, the scientist Monica Gagliano states that it is inaccurate and unethical to answer the question “How do plants sound?” by transposing vegetal processes onto musical scales. The concern is the override of plants’ natural voices with familiar harmonic sounds, the same way time-lapse photography rips plants of its own temporally.

The work of the Slovenian bio-artist and researcher Špela Petrič delves into the frontiers of plant otherness and problematizes plant ethics. In 2015, Petrič performed Skotopoiesis, a durational piece in which the artist faced a germinating cress for 19 hours. The artist figure casted a shadow on the cress contributing to the etiolation (blanching, whitening) of the plants. Petrič wrote that the 19-hour period of active inactivity was her way of surrendering to the plant. I asked Špela Petrič’ about her perspective on ethics and performative plants:

I think the reason so many people started asking about the ethics of plant use stems on one hand from an increasing pool of knowledge that suggests plants are very much a complex, sentient beings, and on the other because we find ourselves in a spiraling loop of exploitation of all living beings, which provokes questions like: how did we get here and what can we possibly do to change our cosmology to be conducive of a livable world?

For Špela, plant ethics is not tied to artists’ treatment of plants but rather what kind of story the work tells to the audience. Špela confesses:

This part – the way an artwork is perceived – can be tricky and that is why I write about the trap of interfaces. I’ve struggled with it myself; in my best attempt to forefront the relationship between humans and plants I sometimes had to admit to being overpowered by the technology I used. Technology wants to tell its own narrative – the medium is the message – and we should be aware of that.

As to the risk of creating an anthropomorphic experience with plants, Špela sees an opportunity here:

I don’t think anthropomorphic experiences as a point of entry into the plant world should be a priori avoided, we might even say that anthropomorphism is one of our greatest tools for connecting with other species, but the task for artists is one of editing, of observing and of being mindful to what the artwork is saying.

Artistic practices with plants through music or sound can open the hidden territories of vibrant plant matter and an underground mesh of rhythms and patterns. The act of listening to plant life is an act of acknowledgment, a possibility for emotional identification and empathy rendering plants visible.

Featured image: “Music to Grow Plants By,” compilation by the author

Carlo Patrão is an independent radio artist based in New York City. zeppelinruc.wordpress.com

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Sounding Out! Podcast #58: The Meaning of Silence – Marcella Ernest

Learning to Listen Beyond Our Ears: Reflecting Upon World Listening Day–Owen Marshall