Plant-Space-Being

Thank you for the invitation


Presentation (20 minutes)


Unstable Bodies is an artistic research project supervised by Wolfgang Tschapeller and succeeds the artistic research project INTRA-SPACE. We are a core team of young, emerging researchers, most of which are present today and it is me who gives this presentation, but we will together then enter into the dialogue afterwards. Intro for Rüdiger, Fabian and Johann. We are all based here and actually have a history, being former students of, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, with the exception of computer engineer Christian Freude who is based at TU Wien Informatics, Institute for Visual Computing and Human-Centered Technology. We collaborate with a group of artists and scientists: Esther Balfe, dancer and choreographer who has been part of INTRA-SPACE, former company member of The Forsythe Company; Rosetta Elkin, landscape architect and associate of the Arnold Arboretum, Harvard University and director of landscape architecture at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn; Monica Gagliano, evolutionary ecologist at Southern Cross University where she directs the Biological Intelligence Lab; Vicki Kirby, professor of Social Sciences, The University of New South Wales researching the nature/culture division; Thomas Lamarre, Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies researching animal studies; science and technology studies; Japanese and continental philosophy University of Chicago; Vlad Vyazovskiy, Professor of Sleep Physiology, Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, Oxford University.


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Today, we have selected four excerpts of research practice which we would like to share with you, involving some of our collaborators. There are other strands of experimentation that we can talk about in the discussion if helpful.


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To begin with, we return to the central question of the artistic research project “Unstable Bodies” itself, which interrogates assumptions about consciousness and perception, or what defines “being human.” Thus, we revisit preconceived notions about what it means “to see”, “to measure”, “to think,” by looking at vegetal modes of perceiving; exploring how a perceptive synesthesia could provoke and translate into different conceptualizations and understandings of human experience, and our co-habitation with other species.


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Casting the Pod is the first episode of a podcast. We have participated in a call by Wissenstransfer Ost, hosted by the University for Music and Performance Art Vienna and directed by Julia Grillmayr and Anna Zethner, entitled „Wissenschaft im Ohr“ - on how to do a science podcasts. We have been among 5 selected research teams to participate in the workshop, individual coaching and presentations. Indeed, a fantastic opportunity to share techniques and discuss different conceptual and methodological approaches as well as production insights in podcast making. As we have been somewhat geographically kept distant from our collaborator based in Australia, Monica Gagliano and the pandemic seasoning appeared to work against us, we began with an experimental format of conversations out of which we developed a performative score for Monica. Back then she had moved to a research site out in the bush, without stable reception and cut-off from power once in a while. We decided to write a letter, which we, together with Vicki Kirby drafted and that she received in mid September 2021. We then, some weeks later, received several files, images, videos and sound recordings. Monica 00:19 min


Since the initial plan was to start the research project with a visit to Monica’s lab and greenhouses, which was no longer an option at that time, we looked for a greenhouse in Vienna. We found open doors in the greenhouses at Althanstrasse belonging to the Molecular Systems Biology Institute, University of Vienna who were just in the process of moving facilities to the newly built BioCenter in the third district. So we could install ourselves in the gradually emptying greenhouse, only the plants too big to fit through openings and to be transported stayed in the space along with a selection of plants which are no longer of interest to the scientists, have already been observed, participated in tests, scientific leftovers. Together with the ventilation system, the watering system and all kinds of abandoned gardening equipment, we started to tune into this space and its dwellers, listening in between the frequencies of water spraying and dripping, ventilation blinds and noises of temperature and humidity control. These were the climatic zones from where we entered into the conversation with Monica and her vegetal surroundings. We equipped ourselves with different kinds of microphones, larger ones and small, sensitive to different spectra of frequencies and directions of spatially capturing sound. It was one of the first encounters which confronted us with the challenges of scale, human and plant bodies, different timings, physiologies, resolutions.


We continued to work with sound experiments and invited freshwater ecologist and visual artist Christina Gruber and composer Natalia Domínguez Rangel to collaborate with us on the setting of Spheres and Cones about which we will talk a little later in more detail.


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In examining the question „what it means to see?“ we think vision as a collective seeing effort, moving away from the binocular setup to a diffracted mode of seeing, seeing with skin-eyes, distributed, restless, in-between. To do this, we look at the principles of stereoscopic vision and the slight but relative discrepancies in the communication of information, or what is called the disparation, the slight difference between the two images delivered to the retina and consequently to the brain. The stereoscopic principle creates depth, “it merely requires the image formed on the retina of the left eye to be different from the image formed on the retina of the right eye … the two images must not be superposable, but their difference must be slight”. The range in the difference between the two images is limited, even though information increases the further apart. At a certain point each image abruptly becomes independent and thus the corresponding depth is lost.


Raumwesen 02:00 min


One of the first attempts took a virtual mesh of a figure from the previous research project INTRA-SPACE, Carla, and experimented with shifts between human and animal, in this case, snake, stereoscopic parameters. Images drifting apart and closer again while we look at the breathing motion of Carla’s chest. This work was commissioned for the group exhibition „die körper und der raum“ at aut.architektur und tirol that opened in July 2021. A sound piece with technical and human voices speaking from different directions in the space was developed for the animation.


One of the following steps involved the studying of microscopic devices, such as the Leitz Prado projector, built for teaching science and projecting microscopic images for larger audiences. We also reconstructed the first microscope, developed by the Dutch microscopist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek which he manufactured himself from silver, a tiny instrument only 55 x 16 x 22 mm.


Leeuwenhoek 1:19 min


As we begin to dwell in the optical and temporal mechanisms of seeing, we also become part of translation processes. We actually experience a transitioning of proportions and sizes, their temporality, resolution, depths, and colors. No longer are we looking at spectacular scale jumps from the cosmic to the molecular. We calm down. We perform modest, tiny gestures, with a curiosity towards the turbid in the image, the machine, the material. We practice a different focus, possibilities of shifting views (Blickverschiebungen) across and between human and plant modes of perception and wakefulness. Experiments with the mechanisms and anatomies of seeing and being in the world, as potential forms of world-making.


We work work with a middle format slide projector, Götschmann, and prepare slides with droplets, for example, collected from the Danube river, or different pea plants species which we grow in intervals. Alike the situation in the greenhouse, we are interested in the disparate bodies, timings, sensorial capacities and at the same time how it is that they seem strangely familiar. We are interested to enter the dialogue via questions about technology and translation. For example, as technologies of mediation and observation inevitably translate an object into a very specific form of legibility, how should we understand that process and the nature of the evidence it produces? This is one of the reasons why working with film and analogue projection apparatuses has proved to support the fleshing out of the thresholds in seeing/observing and the actual recognition of patterns and its moments of transitioning.


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In May 2022 we were given the opportunity to work in the spaces of Exhibit Eschenbachgasse for three weeks which we used for a discursive program of conversations with invited guests, workshops partly open to interested public, rehearsal space and performance sessions, a book presentation of the previous research for INTRA! INTRA! and to grow peas, to build a winding structure for the plants that is mobile and adaptable. A renticular structure invented in the 1960s by Spanish engineer Emilio Perez Pinero whose patent drawings we used the transfer the logic of the construction on to another material, bamboo. Together with this dwelling framework for the peas, we moved with all our devices from the shared space at Schillerplatz on second floor to the ground floor corner space at Eschenbachgasse. As often with exposures like these, there is always the promise of unanticipated provocations. It is the possibility of surprise that interdisciplinary work can generate that also motivates further „on-site“ plannings for the future. In the building of a grammar for and with different disciplinary languages, resonate their mis-readings, un-heard overtones and undertones - synesthetic imprints.


Spheres and Cones allowed us to make contact with Ingeborg Lang who analyses the cellular and structural components that render a plant more tolerant towards various stress factors. We were invited to her laboratory and greenhouse facilities at the BioCenter of the University of Vienna.


Monica recommended us to experiment with hydrophones and so we approached Christina Gruber and Natalia Domínguez Rangel to work with us to find ways to listen to the peas. In parallel we began to work with the oral cavity in connection to a movement research together with Esther Balfe and students from the dance program at MUK. With literary scholar and writer Diane Shooman we developed pieces of movement and speech that attempted to critically speak through a cross-disciplinary fabric of voices. This is a brief excerpt from one of the rehearsals working with the physicality of the pea plant, the nuances of movement and body architecture.


Dancers 01:21 min


To conclude on Spheres and Cones I would like to show a slightly longer excerpt of a 16mm film that we recorded in the installation.


Eschenbachgasse 11:16 min


Slide Throughout the project we have been communicating, thinking and reviewing the artistic process using the research catalogue. Also as a shared drafting instrument to collectively develop not only a body of knowledge but also build experiments. One ongoing example I briefly wanted to shortly mention is the restaging of Charles Darwin’s tracing the phenomenon of circumnutation, famously published in his book, The Power of Movement in Plants (1880), his country-house experiments together with his son.


Slide Finally I would like to mention another strand of activity of Unstable Bodies which initially was intended as a modest exchange format and, to a certain degree pushed by the pandemic restrictions, developed into a large collaboration with additional members extending beyond the team of this project. Plant Media is a bi-weekly gathering of thinkers and practitioners from diverse disciplines (architecture, philosophy, cinema studies, literary studies, anthropology, media theory), initiated by Vicki Kirby, Tom Lamarre and Christina Jauernik in early 2021. Since then, it has grown in size and we have held two workshops, one in Vienna and one in Chicago. Each included a curated film program as public event and we have recently held a panel at the SLSA conference on Reading Minds: artificial intelligence, neural networks, and the reading human at Purdue University. As part of this engagement a book project is developing as well as an issue for the Techniques Journal.


I would like to close a more general remark on the different experiments’ focus, as we understand them not so much as a series of encounters between what was previously machinic, human, non-human or technological, or, for example, an aggregation or disaggregation of perceptual modalities, but an exploration of how a living, working sensoria - a perceptive synaesthesia - can generate new forms of attention, translation capacities and modes of inquiry.


Thank you