Artists, Scientists & Botanical Experiments
Plants are acquiring new status and visibility in popular media, and not just as the green symbols of environmentalism. Through their diverse means and toward their distinct ends, artists and scientists are demonstrating that plants participate actively in their worlds through finely tuned sensory systems.
With advances in digital media and information technologies, the plant sciences are undergoing a radical transformation. Scientists are showing that plants are active, sentient, communicative agents that can catalyze ecological complex relations. Plant physiologists have recently dedicated a new journal to the study of what they are calling “plant neurobiology” (Brenner et al. 2006, Stahlberg 2006). These researchers are analyzing the ways that plants transduce chemical and electrical signals through their tissues and are developing new techniques to track the volatile compounds that plants synthesize in order communicate in larger, multispecies ecologies. Researchers are also tracking plants’ slow movements of growth and their affinities for light and other stimuli, their high-speed movements such as spring-loaded seed dispersal, the active intra-cellular transport of water and gases, and the rhythmical movements of plants’ circadian cycles.
At the same time, contemporary artists such as Jo Simalaya Alcampo and Laura Cinti are actively engaging with scientists, conducting their own experiments and re-narrating plants as protagonists that shape human history. As artists track tropisms, temporalities, and electrical conductance through a variety of digital and electro-acoustic media, they are intervening in ethical debates and providing new platforms on which to consider the implications of plant sentience (Cinti 2011). Practitioners in the arts and the scientists are galvanizing new publics as they demonstrate the multiple ways that plants can transform our perceptions of temporality, sensation, and vitality.
