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Plants have played key roles in some of the most notable science fiction, from prose to graphic novels and film: John Wyndham’s triffids, the sentient and telepathic flora in Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Vaster than Empires and More Slow,” the gene-hacked crops of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, the agricultural experiments of Andy Weir’s The Martian, the invasive trees and mechaflowers of Warren Ellis’s Trees, and the galactic greenhouses of Silent Running represent just a few. Plants surround us, sustain us, pique our imaginations, and inhabit our metaphors—and yet in some ways they remain opaque. As Randy Laist writes in Plants and Literature (2013): “Plants seem to inhabit a time-sense, a life cycle, a desire structure, and a morphology that is so utterly alien that it is easy and even tempting to deny their status as animate organisms” (12). The scope of their alienation is as broad as their biodiversity. And yet, literary reflections of plant-life are driven, as are many threads of science fictional inquiry, by the concerns of today.

Throughout human history, plants have supported as well as controlled populations; influenced and revised how we think about ourselves, nature, temporality, and history; fostered technological innovation; and raised new legal issues, such as biomatter copyrights and the borders of non-human personhood. Even though speculations about terrestrial and extraterrestrial plant-life have ever abounded in science fiction, we are only just beginning to understand plant communication, kinship systems, and intelligence. Following the rise of fields such as ethnobotany, agricultural phonobiology, and phytophenomenology; the embrasure of ecology, environmental philosophy, and ecocriticism; and the concomitant increase in concern regarding our fragile and endangered planetary ecosystem, this edited collection is timely, if not overdue.

Science fiction allows us to speculate further on what—or who—plant life may be while exploring how we understand ourselves in relation to the mute (?) sentient (?) world of flora. Thinking about plants differently changes not just our understanding of plants themselves, but also transforms our attitudes toward morality, politics, economics, and cultural life at large. How do the parameters of good and evil, villainy, heroism, and responsibility shift when plant-based life comes into play? How do plant-based characters or foci shift our understandings of institutions, nations, borders, and boundaries? What roles do plants play in our visions of utopian and dystopian futures? How do botanical subjectivities impact our empathic reactions? Our understandings of sentience and agency? How does the inclusion (or exclusion) of plant-based life impact the genre of science fiction?

This volume will be the first to investigate the importance of plants in science fiction. We encourage contributions contending with diverse works from any and all global, national, extranational, or regional positions and all periods. In particular, we welcome essays which consider genre with broader ethical, political, aesthetic, and historical concerns tied to the representation of botanical subjects and subjectivities in science fiction across all media.

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Reassembling the Natural

http://reassemblingnature.org/about/

Reassembling the Natural is an ongoing exhibition-led inquiry into the “necroaesthetics” of contemporary natural history led by Principal Co-Investigators Anna-Sophie Springer and Dr Etienne Turpin.  The project combines ethnographic research, field work, archival study, and art-science collaboration in order to convene together and curate scientists, artists, and theorists from the Americas, Europe, Amazonia, and Nusantara for a sustained conversation about the future of “natural history” on Earth. The project takes as its objective a serious, transdisciplinary review of the concept of nature—including its role within the knowledge infrastructure of the sciences, its elaborate housing of myths and cultural heritage, and its consistent place within the arts and humanities—in the context of our accelerating planetary extinction. How can those fields of inquiry through which nature came to be shared, studied, and conserved in human cultures begin to reassemble knowledges among the fragmented worlds threatened by anthropogenic transformation? How can new forms of inquiry and collaboration begin to unground the assumptions of knowledge, futurity, and security which limit the discourse of our contemporary environmental crisis? How can we reassemble and exhibit an exemplary plea for a reconsideration of the natural and its vital role in visual culture, design, science and beyond?

To productively collide with the present crisis, ideas cannot be constrained by disciplines. To date, research for this project has been displayed publicly in the major exhibition 125.660 Spesimen Sejarah Alam [125,660 Specimens of Natural History], which debuted in August 2015 at the contemporary arts center Komunitas Salihara in Jakarta, Indonesia, in partnership with the Indonesian Institute of Science. A second German exhibition cycle, Verschwindende Vermächtnisse: Die Welt als Wald [Disappearing Legacies: The World as Forest], will open at the Centrum für Naturkunde, Universität Hamburg, in October 2017; travel to Tieranatomisches Theater, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in Summer 2018; and, then complete the cycle at Zentralmagazin Naturwissenschaftlicher Sammlungen, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg in October 2018. Verschwindende Vermächtnisse is a cooperation with the Schering Stiftung and funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation.

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The Literal Intimacies of Zoology: Reading Through the Folders of Colonial-Science Sara Giannini in conversation with Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin

http://unfold.thevolumeproject.com/

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OBJET: SPECULATIVE VEGETATION: PLANTS IN SCIENCE FICTION (CFP)

OBJET: SPECULATIVE VEGETATION: PLANTS IN SCIENCE FICTION (CFP)  Please feel free to share this CFP anywhere it might generate interest. Thanks! Speculative Vegetation: Plants in Science Fiction Call for Papers (Edited Collection) Plants have played key roles in some of the most notable science fiction, from prose to graphic novels and film: John Wyndham’s triffids, the sentient and telepathic flora in Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Vaster than Empires and More Slow,” the gene-hacked crops of Paolo Bacigalupi’s _The Windup Girl_, the agricultural experiments of Andy Weir’s _The Martian_, the invasive trees and mechaflowers of Warren Ellis’s _Trees_, and the galactic greenhouses of _Silent Running_ represent just a few. Plants surround us, sustain us, pique our imaginations, and inhabit our metaphors — and yet in some ways they remain opaque. As Randy Laist writes in _Plants and Literature_ (2013): “Plants seem to inhabit a time-sense, a life cycle, a desire structure, and a morphology that is so utterly alien that it is easy and even tempting to deny their status as animate organisms” (12). The scope of their alienation is as broad as their biodiversity. And yet, literary reflections of plant-life are driven, as are many threads of science fictional inquiry, by the concerns of today. Throughout human history, plants have supported as well as controlled populations; influenced and revised how we think about ourselves, nature, temporality, and history; fostered technological innovation; and raised new legal issues, such as biomatter copyrights and the borders of non-human personhood. Even though speculations about terrestrial and extraterrestrial plant-life have ever abounded in science fiction, we are only just beginning to understand plant communication, kinship systems, and intelligence. Following the rise of fields such as ethnobotany, agricultural phonobiology, and phytophenomenology; the embrasure of ecology, environmental philosophy, and ecocriticism; and the concomitant increase in concern regarding our fragile and endangered planetary ecosystem, this edited collection is timely, if not overdue. Science fiction allows us to speculate further on what — or who — plant life may be while exploring how we understand ourselves in relation to the mute (?) sentient (?) world of flora. Thinking about plants differently changes not just our understanding of plants themselves, but also transforms our attitudes toward morality, politics, economics, and cultural life at large. How do the parameters of good and evil, villainy, heroism, and responsibility shift when plant-based life comes into play? How do plant-based characters or foci shift our understandings of institutions, nations, borders, and boundaries? What roles do plants play in our visions of utopian and dystopian futures? How do botanical subjectivities impact our empathic reactions? Our understandings of sentience and agency? How does the inclusion (or exclusion) of plant-based life impact the genre of science fiction? This volume will be the first to investigate the importance of plants in science fiction. We encourage contributions contending with diverse works from any and all global, national, extranational, or regional positions and all periods. In particular, we welcome essays which consider genre with broader ethical, political, aesthetic, and historical concerns tied to the representation of botanical subjects and subjectivities in science fiction across all media. Authors are encouraged to consider, but are not constrained to the following topics and subjects: >>> Authorship/readership: plant-based authors/readers >>> Ecocriticism/Green studies: ecology, human/animal/plant interaction and interdependence; anthropomorphism vs. plant  subjectivity and agency >>> Empire: postcolonialism, colonialism, anti-imperialism, pastoral, anti-pastoral >>> Ethics: individual responsibility, corporate responsibility, global responsibility; carbon trading >>> >>> Green activism: ‘eco-terrorism’; indigenous lands; environmental legislation; non-human personhood >>> >>> Habitats: space exploration and colonization; extraplanetary agrarian systems; diasporas, migration, borderlands; heterotopias, utopias, New Edens, dystopias; wilderness vs domesticated >>> >>> Hybridity: botanical technology; plant-animal / plant-human hybrids; arcologies >>> >>> Medicine: drugs, poisons, health, ability/disability >>> Monstrosity: plant-animal / plant-human hybrids; dehumanization; zombification >>> >>> Narratology: plant perspectives, subjectivities, narrators and/or focalizers >>> >>> Sentience: consciousness, collective intelligence, ontology, posthumanism >>> >>> Symbolism: plants as symbols, metaphors, metonymies >>> Time: alternate time scales; histories; chronologies (“tree rings”) >>> >>> Value: capitalism, plants and finance; weeds, crops, ornamental >>> War and peace: weapons, agents of destruction; agents of salvation >>> Prospective contributors to this edited collection should send an abstract (300-500 words) and brief CV or short biographical statement to Katherine Bishop (kbishop@sky.miyazaki-mic.ac.jp), >>> Jerry Määttä (Jerry.Maatta@littvet.uu.se), and David Higgins (dmhiggin@gmail.com). >>> >>> For full consideration, abstracts are due by 30 April 2017. Completed essays of between 4,000 and 8,000 words will be due by 30 November 2017 for a projected publication date in 2018.

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soil ontologies?

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0306312715599851

The dominant drive for understanding soil has been to pace its fertility with human demand. Today, warnings about soil’s exhaustion and endangered ecology raise concerns marked by fears of gloomy environmental futures, prompting scientists and soil practitioners urgently to develop better ways of taking care of soils. Yet the pace required by ecological soil care could be at odds with the predominant temporal orientation of technoscientific intervention, which is driven by an inherently progressivist, productionist and restless mode of futurity. Through a conceptual and historical approach to the soil sciences and other domains of soil knowledge, this article looks for soil ontologies and relations to soil care that are obscured by the predominant timescape. Contemporary discussions of the future of the soil sciences expose tensions between ‘progress as usual’ – by intensifying productivity – and the need to protect the pace of soil renewal. The intimate relation of soil science with productionism is being interrogated, as ecology attempts to engage with soil as a living community rather than a receptacle for crops. In this context, and beyond science, the ‘foodweb’ model of soil ecology has become a figure of alternative human–soil relations that involve environmental practitioners in the soil community. Reading these ways of making time for soil as a form of ‘care time’ helps to reveal a diversity of more-than-human interdependent temporalities, disrupting the anthropocentric appeal of predominant timescales of technoscientific futurity and their reductive notion of innovation.

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Maria Puig de la Bellacasa

Research Interests

My work is grounded in science and technology studies, feminist theory and the environmental humanities. I am interested in how questions of ethics, politics and justice affect and are affected by scientific practices, as well as on the socio-cultural imaginaries enacted by technoscientific interventions. My other main broad research interest is in alternative spaces of knowing and doing – currently focused on everyday forms of ecological care, permaculture movements and materialist spiritualities. Marked by a background in contemporary continental philosophy and constructivist and process philosophies, my earlier work and publications are on feminist epistemologies and the transformations of the politics of knowledge production, scientific practice and technological innovations in the ‘knowledge economy’, all topics in which I have an ongoing interest.

Projects

I am currently working on two research projects:

The Reanimation of Soils. Transforming Human-Soil Affections Through Science, Culture and Community is an exploration of contemporary changes in human-soil relations. Delving in a range of interventions, practices and materials from science, art,community activism and soil policy and advocacy I am interested in exploring the transformative potential of contemporary human-soil encounters that happen beyond the usual constituencies and uses of soil for production. By thinking transversally across fields and interventions that are attempting to change the ways we relate to soils I hope to contribute to the nurturing of everyday ecological awareness and re-connection to soils.

A second interconnected project, Embracing Breakdown, is a search of an ethos of sharing and passing on of matter -- nutrients, energy, elements. Affected by anxieties about the damages brought by the compounded legacies of industrialism in the present I look into fields of practice – such as bioremediation – that are confronting the local enactments of altered biogeochemical processes – e.g. the nitrogen cycle. I see these as spaces of experimentation where the resistance of built up matter to degradation and recirculation disrupts the fascination with life as productivity and endurance.

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conversation with jo

reposturing

restating project to self

strategize

what can imame that would maych my energy

practical convo. not mystique

getting weird about it being mystical

"im doing this!" having vibratto what is a commanding

in a field of not enough resources or opportunities

concision and the way its told

a good story rarely lines up with honoring its complexity

partial realities

scientific universalism announces that it knows everything relevant. scientific illustrations kept and idealistic never entirely true but still displayed as complete.

unseeing decolonial imagining what it could look like. what would it mean to disassemble. destroying isn't the violent, it is the naming in the first place

rescue things as discrete objects. is seed the plant? is organ the plant?

what histories allowed these specimens in these places (journals,

journals are PH neutral

there is a hugely aesthetic part of this project of colonial botany

involved.

building systems where you can perform those. collect specimens and destroy

render plant in form

how do you make something that announces its edges and what it cant tell

you can draw it or stage it

décolonisation as an attack on the museum

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decolonial media and collective performance ???

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Candice Lin, “Sycorax’s Collections,” 2012, etching with watercolor and dried plants.

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Vasco Araújo

http://autograph-abp.co.uk/exhibitions/decolonial-desire

Botânica #5, 2012-14