INSERT #7 Plant Intelligence—Towards a Vegetal Aesthetics

 

Edited by Yvonne Volkart

The seventh issue of INSERT Plant Intelligence—Towards a Vegetal Aesthetics brings together current interdisciplinary discourses on plant intelligence from the perspective of aesthetic theory and practice. Employing the means of art and art theory and in close exchange with scientific, everyday cultural, traditional, and spiritual methods, plants are explored, dominant notions are called into question and alternative concepts of plant modes of existence are brought into play. Artists, philosophers, indigenous media activists, art and media theorists, as well as biologists seek modes of articulation, media, methods, and traditions that view plants as sensing, acting, flexible—intelligent—beings. How do they research plant forms of perception and making of worlds, and how do they relate to them? How could an adequate plant aesthetics be formulated if we define it as something that is closely connected to the way plants exist and behave?

With contributions by Giovanni Aloi/Yvonne Volkart, Noelia Billi, Felipe Castelblanco/Ayênan John Quinchoa Juajibioy/Natalia Uribe Macías, Ursula Damm/Michaela Ott, Matthew Fuller, Julia Mensch, Cate Sandilands, Rasa Smite.

This issue of INSERT was created within the framework of the research project Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant (2022–2025) which is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and based at the Institute Art Gender Nature, Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW. Further information: http://plants-intelligence.ch

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