Plants by Numbers: Art, Computation, and Queer Feminist Technoscience

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This open access book takes a queer feminist technoscience approach to the ecologies that emerge from our entanglements with nonhumans (air, rocks, algae, trees, soil and plants) and computational hard/software. Artists, feminist techno-scientists and theorists working with computation, Plants by Numbers address the current need to think beyond the human paradigm, opening up new fields of debate that question the troubled relationship between ecosystems and human technology. Organised around three key themes techno-nature entanglements, plants as resistant agents, and becoming-with-plants the volume provides a vital pathway through complex theoretical ideas that inform the practices of artists working in the fields of computation and ecology. Taking art theoretical and art practice approaches, contributors describe how we might design, make and imagine computational processes differently, or otherwise, through the co-production of artworks with plants. The authors show how these artworks open up new potentialities, and anti-colonial perspectives in the ways they engage with the contested sites of knowing and unknowing in technoscience. Describing in detail how we might design computational processes differently, the book shows how these artworks might act as communicative media between the biological and technological, thus opening up new potential areas of research whilst producing new ethical-political engagements. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the University of Michigan.

Author Bio

Jane Prophet is an artist and Professor at Stamps School of Art and Design, University of Michigan, USA. She works across media and disciplines to produce apps, objects and installations, frequently combining traditional and computational media. Prophets papers position art in relation to contemporary debates about art, feminist technoscience, artificial life and ubiquitous computing. Helen V. Pritchard is Associate Professor of Queer Feminist Technoscience & Digital Design and programme lead for HGK-FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, Switzerland. They are the co-editor of Data Browser 06: Executing Practices (2018) and the special issue of Science, Technology and Human Values Sensors and Sensing Practices (2019).