Plants by Numbers: Art, Computation, and Queer Feminist Technoscience

by Jane Prophet (Editor), Charissa N. Terranova (Editor), Helen V. Pritchard (Editor), Meredith Tromble (Editor)

Overview

This open access book takes a queer, feminist, and decolonial technoscience approach to the ecologies that emerge from our entanglements with nonhumans (air, rocks, algae, trees, soil and plants) and computational hard/software. In Plants by Numbers, artists and theorists working with computation address the urgent need to think beyond the human paradigm, opening up new fields of debate that question the troubled relationship between ecosystems and human technology.

Organised around three key themes—techno-nature entanglements, plants as resistant agents, and becoming-with-plants—the volume provides a vital pathway through complex theoretical ideas that inform the practices of artists working in the fields of computation and ecology.

Fusing art theoretical and art practice approaches, the contributors describe how we might design, make and imagine computational processes differently, or otherwise, through the co-production of artworks with plants. Showing how these artworks might act as communicative media between the biological and technological, Plants by Numbers opens up new potential areas of research whilst producing new ethical-political engagements.

The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the University of Michigan.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350343252
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	11/16/2023
Series:	Biotechne: Interthinking Art, Science and Design
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.35(w) x 9.45(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Charissa N. Terranova is Margaret M. McDermott Distinguished Chair in Art and Aesthetic Studies and Professor of Art and Architectural History at the University of Texas at Dallas, USA. She researches the relationship between culture and science, focusing on the history of evolutionary theory and biology in art and architecture. She is author of Art as Organism: Biology and the Evolution of the Digital Image (2016) and Automotive Prosthetic: Technological Mediation and the Car in Conceptual Art (2014), and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art and Architecture (2016), and the Biotechne series with Meredith Tromble.

Meredith Tromble is an intermedia artist and writer based in California. Her books, artworks, and performances give form to the links between imagination and knowledge. She is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies/Art & Technology Emeritus, San Francisco Art Institute, USA.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
List of Plates
List of Figures

Introduction

Part One: Techno-nature entanglements
1. Afro-now-ist Stories of Resistance: A Conversation with Stephanie Dinkins, Stephanie Dinkins (Stony Brook University, USA) and Srimoyee Mitra (University of Michigan, USA)
2. The Compromised/Compromising Life of a Farmed Plant, Elaine Gan (Wesleyan University, USA)
3. As Children of Plants, we Play in our Machine Gardens, Amy Youngs (Ohio State University, USA)
4. Co-operating with Diatoms - queer fabulations of a world feeling computing, Helen V. Pritchard (HGK-FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland)
5. So-called Plants, Possible Bodies, Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting (Interdependent researchers, Barcelona and Brussels)

Part Two: Plants – resistance, regeneration and alliance
6. Forests that Compute, Jennifer Gabrys (University of Cambridge, UK)
7. Watered by Data and Other Bio-economic Thoughts: A Conversation Between Curator Belinda Kwan and Artist Stephanie Rothenberg, Belinda Kwan (Independent curator, Canada) and Stephanie Rothenberg (SUNY Buffalo, USA)
8. Tending to 2030m3: How to regenerate regeneration? How to unasphalt asphalt?, Helen V. Pritchard (HGK-FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland), Eric Snodgrass (Linnaeus University/Linköping, Sweden) Miranda Moss (Artist, South Africa), Daniel Gustafsson (Linnaeus University, Sweden
9. Decolonization, Computation, Propagation: Phyto-human alliances in the pathways towards generative justice, Ron Eglash, Audrey Bennett, Lionel Robert, Kwame Porter Robinson, Matthew Garvin, Mark Guzdial (all, University of Michigan, USA)

Part Three: Becoming-with-plants
10. Codely Phytographia: an artist's material history of writing code with trees, Jane Prophet (University of Michigan, USA)
11. Tehran of Trees, Sina Seifee (Artist, Belgium/Iran)
12. Writing in the Wind: Ecopoetics and geoengineering, Joel Ong (York University, Canada)
13. Sunbot Swarm: Absurdist Cyborg Systems for House Plants, Kathleen McDermott (NYU Tandon, USA)
14. Yellow Furry Lullaby, Breakwater, Youngsook Choi and Taey Iohe (Artists, UK/Korea)

Glossary
Index

Editorial Reviews

A text that demonstrates the vital importance of observing and treating plants as our companion species, and as cohabitants of this planet to bend towards and learn from, as we ponder our own significance and survival, threatening the end of the anthropocene.” —Legacy Russell, Executive Director and Chief Curator of The Kitchen, author of Glitch Feminism (2020)

“Plants by Numbers works through how coloniality shapes, but does not absolutely envelop, our queerly inter-human and inter-ecological worlds. Rethinking classificatory taxonomies, the book centres plant-life and its aesthetic-scientific possibilities in an eloquent intervention into studies of livingness, affect, and relationality.” —Katherine McKittrick, Professor and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies, Queen's University, Canada; Author of Dear Science and Other Stories (2021)

“This timely collection of accounts by artists, curators, technoscientists and theorists speculates on different modes of world-making and creating kinship with plants, establishing a rich ground for more-than human entanglements.” —Petra Löffler, Professor of Contemporary Media Theory and History, Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, Germany

“Growing from a simple prompt, to consider numbering-otherwise, this volume brings together artistic, academic and community-building studies and productions of co-constitutive life worlds of plants and soil, computation and simulation, humans and more-than-humans.

Rooted in anti-colonial, Black and Indigenous, trans-feminist and queer science and technology studies and poetics, shifting away from numbering as a method of control, and generously reimagining accounts, plots and digging as critical cultivating methods and creative practices, Plants By Numbers is essential reading (and experiencing) for artists, scholars, organizers, gardeners, farmers, teachers, observers, dreamers and anyone moved by the transformational and technocultural worlding of entangled plant lives.” —Jas Rault & T.L. Cowan, co-authors of Heavy Processing (2023)

“In our data-driven world, this collection asks how we might articulate an ethico-politics of numbers with respect to the more-than-human world. Respect is key here, for the power of enumeration but also for its limits, and for the irreducible relationality of sustainable world-making.” —Lucy Suchman, Professor Emerita, Anthropology of Science and Technology, Lancaster University, UK

From the Publisher