Dendromacy by Karine Bonneval

Dendromacy, done in collaboration with Claire Damesin - plant ecologist- aims to connect the breathing of a tree with one of a human body. The unique character of the film derives from both the process method between the artist and the scientific and the use of a recent technical device, a cooled infrared camera developed for the detection of gas leaks in industries. A chamber inspired by gas exchange chamber used for scientific CO2 efflux measurements was built around the trunk of an almost centennial oak tree. This chamber was an invitation for the human to share intimacy with the tree, keeping in touch with the whole forest as the chamber was transparent. This original protocol allowed us to gently catch the breath of the tree, and to film our crossed invisible breaths. These moments are fleeting and show the fragility and preciousness of the interactions. During the making of the film, spontaneous feelings and ideas were expressed like a dance of back and forth between artistic and scientific sides. Therefore, a sensitive relationship was emerging between the tree and the human transforming the scientific-inspired experiment into a sensual and poetic experience.
The soundtrack was created by Jean-Michel Ponty from percussions on wood pieces and wooden instruments. The resonance of the plant tissue produces a sound dissonance that echoes the singularity of the images and accords with the polychrome of the frame sequences and the rhythm of their scrolling.

How to regain empathy towards the non-human? Karine Bonneval focuses on the plant otherness, and the complex and specific interactions that link human and plants. In her projects, she is also interested in the way in which vegetal, animal or human forms constitute references of any times exploited by artists. Already present in some popular art productions made by hand, these influences sometimes find strange vocabulary coincidences from one place of production to another, yet remained without contact. Karine Bonneval is passionate about these formal analogies that she re-uses and hybridises with multiple biases in her work. http://www.karinebonneval.com/

The Red Nature of Mammalga by Naja Ryde Ankarfeldt, Amanda Baum & Rose Leahy

Mammalga, a performative installation fusing red algal and human bodies, offers a complimentary view to the wave of ’greenness’ and articulates both the sensual and visual connection between bodies across species and time. For billions of years different species of red algae have been creating conditions for biodiversity to flourish, including human life. Notably, the human body has an ancient entanglement with a certain kind of red algae (Bangiomorpha pubescens), the first known sexually reproducing organism as well as the origin of eukaryotic cells and thus evolutionary mother of all earthly mammals. Examining the branching skeletons of the red algae we see our veins and realise the entanglement of the lives and deaths of our own mammalian nature with the oldest living multicellular organisms. For millennia red algae have been used as medical remedies and as sources of food, such as the edible dulse, Palmaria palmata. Red marine algae is furthermore amongst the most vital elements which our immune system needs in minute quantities. It is high in vitamins, minerals and antioxidants that are easily utilized by the human body. 

The Red Nature of Mammalga is an international collaboration between Naja Ryde Ankarfeldt (DK), Amanda Baum (DK) and Rose Leahy (UK). They work between art, design and the life sciences to produce exhibitions and experiences that explore ecological communities and multispecies worlds in a time of global transformations. Following years of studying and working in both Copenhagen, London and The Hague, they now draw on their diverse yet connected experiences, joining forces in creating the performative installation. Whilst Naja Ryde Ankarfeldt has worked on artistic and curatorial projects in Copenhagen, lately Medical Museion and Købehavns Rådhus, Amanda Baum and Rose Leahy have been artists-in-residence at The Florence Trust in London and worked on projects in the UK, US, Norway and the Netherlands, where they recently won the Bio Art & Design Awards 2018.

http://cargocollective.com/najarydeankarfeldt
https://www.roseleahy.com/
http://amandabaum.com/

BOLD_G Model of the Brain: A Green Flow Metaphor by Margarete Jahrmann & Stefan Glasauer

In the BOLD_G model we understand brain activity as flow of biochemical substances, similar to the flow of blood — instead of electromechanically influenced metaphors about the “firing” of neurons, “spikes” and “action potentials”. The flow metaphor allows moving away from misleading notions such as “the brain as a computer” and provides a more natural view on the central nervous system. In the BOLD_G model brain function can be understood as flow, diffusion and absorption, an exchange of liquids and solvents. The flow model of the brain is a green metaphor, much more akin to the vascular transport of nutrients in plants. The flow metaphor is obvious also in current measurement techniques of brain function such as blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) contrast imaging or calcium imaging. The green blood in censored games reminds us of these interconnections — of the bloodstream and data as its constituent element. In a structural coupling of contents and fields of research as enacted Ludic method we perform the song of the neurons and visualize our model by animating the epistemic object, the neuron, appearing as green stream of thought and its representations.

Margarete Jahrmann works in artistic research and critical game activism, focusing on experimental systems as hermeneutical surface. Stemming from a decade of experience in game art exhibitions, Augmented Reality performances, game design and game culture publications, she intensified her focus on arts research in life sciences and neurophilosophy. With her latest art works and articles she critically questions scientific experiments in relation to the recent increase of brain reading practices, self-optimization and data surveillance in gamified life style technologies. Her main actual interest lies in the artistic inquiry of the attributed social meaning of neurosciences and aesthetics in relation to very personal “data” as potential inscription about the human condition. http://www.margaretejahrmann.net

Stefan Glasauer is a neuroscientist, Professor for Computational Neurosciences at University Cottbus, teaching and working at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. He is interested in general principles underlying perception, action, and sensorimotor control. After studying Electrical Engineering with a focus in cybernetics, he did his PhD at the Max-Planck-Institute for Behavioral Physiology on perception of gravity. Following a postdoctoral stay at the CNRS and College de France in Paris, he returned to Munich to coordinate the Center for Sensorimotor Research. He is founding member of the Munich Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, member of the scientific boards of the Graduate School for Systemic Neurosciences and of the Munich Center for the Neurosciences, and member of the Center of Competence for Neural Engineering of the Technical University Munich.

The Chthulu and the Final Girl by Meredith Drum

The Chthulu and the Final Girl is inspired by Donna Haraway’s recent writing on the Anthropocene, Capitalocene and Chthulucene. In particular, it is energized by Haraway’s focus on chthonic entities, figures of creation and destruction - metonymies for forces that may “make possible partial and robust biological-cultural-politicaltechnological recuperation and recomposition.” (1) The work also rises out of my interest in the final girl trope: the female survivors of horror films interpreted as potent, if murky, icons of power, resistance and speculative feminism.

Meredith Drum is an experimental cinema-maker; in addition to her screen work she often collaborates with other visual artists as well as dancers, architects, writers, urban planners, computer programmers and scientists on location-based public projects, movement research, augmented reality apps and books. As Drum employs electronic media, she turns a critical eye on the commercial world of digital objects and experiences and sets out to open more compassionate technical imaginaries. http://meredithdrum.com/

(1) Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities. V 6, 2015, p. 160.

Becoming Sensor by Natasha Myers & Ayelen Liberona

Becoming Sensor is a long-term research-creation collaboration between dancer/filmmaker Ayelen Liberona and dancer/anthropologist Natasha Myers. It experiments with art and ethnography to cultivate an ungrid-able ecology of ancient oak savannah lands in Toronto. Oak savannahs are naturecultures, happenings 10,000 years in-the-making, sites where people have learned how to conspire with plants through fire in order to grow livable worlds. Becoming Sensor experiments with protocols to detune the colonial sensorium and invent alterdata forms that can do justice to documenting the affective ecologies and forms of involutionary momentum unfolding across these urban lands. Seeking new ways to render the unseen, ephemeral, and numinous, and to tune into and conjure deep time and ephemeral happenings, these video works experiment with forms of animation through kinesthetic imaging and kinesthetic listening, generating what we call a kind of alchemical cinema.

Ayelen Liberona is an artist and educator creating at the intersections of dance, film and photography. Born in Toronto to Chilean political refugees, she began with a career in dance that has evolved toward explorations of movement and the moving image as powerful tools for change and social justice. Her award winning films and cinematic immersive experiences seek to provoke radical new ways of telling stories about lands and bodies. Staging plant-people conspiracies alongside anthropologist Natasha Myers has been the fountainhead of Becoming Sensor, a research-creation project in High Park’s Oak Savannah and beyond. www.ayelenliberona.com

Natasha Myers is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at York University. She is the Director of the Plant Studies Collaboratory, the Convenor of the Politics of Evidence Working Group, the co-founder of the Technoscience Salon, and the co-organizer of the Write2Know Project. She has been working at the cusp of art, science, and anthropology for twenty years, first as a dancer/choreographer and plant scientist, and more recently as an anthropologist of art, science, and ecology. Her current projects span investigations of the arts and sciences of vegetal sensing and sentience, the politics and aesthetics of garden enclosures in a time of climate change, and most recently, she has launched a long-term ethnography experimenting with the arts of ecological attention in Toronto’s High Park’s Oak Savannah. http://natashamyers.org

For more on Becoming Sensor see http://becomingsensor.com, and recent texts by Natasha Myers: https://natashamyers.wordpress.com/.

Stone is the New Green by Paul A. Harris

This project explores the entanglement of lithic and living matter indoors and outdoors. Two vinyl banners from “Co-Modified: Studies in GeoMedia” (with Richard Turner) present images of mineral evolution and the co-evolution of rocks and life, from aeonic origins to human-mediated minerals produced by mining, shipwrecks, and manufacturing. “Igneous Ligneous Inosculations” is an installation of stones in forked branches of trees on the university campus [you can insert more accurate description of the exact location here] that expresses a shared natural/human agency in art and creates a living-lithic hybrid that evolves over time, and intermingles human, dendrochronological, and geophysical timescales.

Paul A. Harris, Professor of English at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, is co-editor of the renowned literary theory journal SubStanceand served as President of the International Society for the Study of Time 2004 – 2013.  He has published work in areas chaos theory and philosophy, topology and fiction, French theory, constraint-based writing and concrete poetry. He maintains a rock garden and blog called The Petriverse of Pierre Jardin, which informs his research, artwork and writings about stone.

Biohacking Queer Multispecies: performances and lectures with Quimera Rosa, Mary Maggic and Eben Kirksey

Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology and The Multispecies Salon present an evening of (self-)experimental artistic strategies for queer becoming-with nonhuman others. Performance collective Quimera Rosa will present their work on human-plant hybridity in an open chlorophyll tat- too session. Artist Mary Maggic will introduce their work on micro-colonization of bodies, and propose tools for hormone-hacking. The following conversation on the future of (non)humans will be moderated by multispecies ethnographer Eben Kirksey from the Multispecies Salon.

Quimera Rosa [Pink Chimera] is a collective that researches and experiments on bodies, technology and identities. eir work is based on the deconstruction of sex and gender identities from a transfeminist perspective. Particularly interested in the articulation between art, science and technology and their functions in the production of subjectivities, their work is currently focused on the creation of transdisciplinary projects such as Trans*Plant, a project that utilizes living systems and is based on self-experimentation as a process that involves a ’human > plant’ transition.

Mary Maggic is a non-binary artist who makes freak science, workshops with the public, performs with aliens, and exhibits with urine. ey exist between the categorized elds of bio-art, bio-hacking, art-science, citizen-science, though they would rather abandon all. eir most recent work concerns the tension between active and passive queering through estrogenic micro-colonizations and asks: do you want to be more alien than you already are?

Eben Kirksey studies the political dimensions of imagination as well as the interplay of natural and cultural history. Duke University Press has published his two books—Freedom in Entangled Worlds (2012) and Emergent Ecologies (2015)—as well as one edited collection: The Multispecies Salon (2014). Venturing into art worlds, he has staged a number of “performative experiments” that have exposed and derailed dominant practices for managing life.

Performance lecture by Eben Kirksey: CRISPR Sperm Bank with Tamara Pertamina

Should Tamara Pertamina’s “CRISPR Sperm Bank” be burned in a pyre of fire? Or should it be populated with hacked sperm that illustrate queer and risky engagements with technoscience? Ask biohackers Tristan Roberts and David Ishee about the technical affordances of emerging gene editing technologies. Participate in a para-ethnographic conversation about an art object, a push cart that could sell genetically modified sperm in Indonesia.

It has crept through for so long, here we landed at one of many contractions by Rikke Mulvad Mortensen

A mime of a postulate: Green is cacophonic in broadness and autonomous in growth.
Curious: As to how and if humans handle, random bodies of signs of immediate unnecessity.
The piece perceives the cultivated handling and perceptual manifestation of green as biomimetics would, for example, a swallow.
The impetus ramp: Batons of text were exchanged by two parties over a month, hereafter distrubuted into diverse environments, inviting to maintain growth and expansion, contraction or erase, with whatever means the recipients felt fit.
The environments were artificially recreated ad hic.

Partially site-specific, a non-static and avataristic approach interwoven an undercurrent of research prioritization, whilst the final manifestations usually is subordinated the conceptual. Especially epistemological barriers and blanks, physics, self-observation, sensory manipulation and representational problems are topics of special interest. Under various pseudonyms worked in South Africa, Spain and Denmark, with various materials and under various professional titles.