After the pandemic pushed back their exhibition, two curators
teamed up to develop The Botanical Mind Online a new platform that makes
effective use of parallels between plant communication and the internet.
Anna Souter
Adam Chodzko, “O, you happy roots, branch and mediatrix” (2020),
screen 2, two-channel video, Hildegard von Bingen’s lingua ignotae, and image
recognition algorithm (image courtesy the artist)
In the last few years, the humanities have seen a marked shift in
interest towards nonhuman forms of intelligence. The recent “vegetal turn” in
eco-philosophy and curatorial practice, for example, attempts to recognize the
central but overlooked cultural and ecological presence of plants and to find
imaginative ways of engaging with them. The upcoming exhibition The Botanical
Mind: Art, Mysticism and the Cosmic Tree at Camden Art Centre, London, looks
likely to be a high point on this trajectory towards using creativity and
criticality to reveal and correct a modern tendency towards what scientist
Monica Gagliano has called “plant blindness.”
The show was scheduled to open in mid-April, but when the ongoing
coronavirus pandemic caused its postponement the Camden Art Centre team worked
to create alternative ways of accessing the ideas and imagery touched on in the
exhibition. The result is The Botanical Mind Online, a dedicated website
exploring the key themes of the exhibition combined with new commissions by
artists, writers, musicians, and philosophers.
The Botanical Mind Online opens with an introductory video narrated
by curators Gina Buenfeld and Martin Clark, offering an impressively succinct
summary of the project’s journey through a series of complexly interconnected
topics including plant intelligence, patterns and geometry, music and harmony,
psychedelia, and the notion of the tree as an “axis mundi.” Together, they suggest, these aspects point to “an encoded intelligence in
the patterns of nature” — a botanical mind.
Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, “Seeing of
Music: The Music of Gounod from Thought Forms” (1905) (image courtesy Camden
Art Centre, public domain)
Moreover, The Botanical Mind is a laudable
attempt to achieve what eco-philosopher Michael Marder describes as
“encountering” plants on their own terms while maintaining a recognition of their
radical alterity. This can be seen in Adam Chodzko’s new digital commission “O,
you happy roots, branch and mediatrix” (2020). The film uses an algorithm to
scan footage of a forest for ciphers — visual traces of a secret language
created by the 12th Century Christian mystic Hildegard von Bingen. Chodzko has
assigned the ciphers a sound from Hildegard’s choral compositions and uses them
to spell out the names of plants both real and imagined. The website features a
clip from the work which, in the curators’ words, “attempts to become an idea
of botanical transformation — at once both a process and its experience.”
Hildegarde von Bingen, “Liber Divinorum Operum
(The book of divine works)” (13th century), illuminated manuscript (detail)
(image courtesy Camden Art Centre, by concession of the Ministry for Cultural
Heritage and Activities – Lucca State Library)
Elsewhere on the site, ideas and imagery are
collected under a range of tantalizing headings, such as “Sacred Geometry,”
“The Cosmic Tree,” and “Astrological Botany.” The chapter on “Indigenous
Cosmologies” explains how the patterns found in nature are the basis of sacred
geometries found in the visual cultures and music of Indigenous Amazonian
communities, many of whom believe these patterns weave the universe together.
There is a particular focus on the Yawanawá people, a group of whom Camden Art
Centre had been working with to develop a new artwork for The Botanical Mind in
collaboration with Delfina Muñoz de Toro, an indigenist, visual artist, and
musician from Argentina. As the Yawanawá collaborators are currently
self-isolating in their village (Indigenous communities are particularly
vulnerable to foreign diseases), The Botanical Mind Online presents artworks
related to their community. These include two experimental ethnographic films
and a series of atmospheric sound recordings by Priscilla Telmon & Vincent
Moon, which are presented alongside photographs and musical compositions by
Muňoz de Toro.
Meanwhile, the chapter on “Vegetal Ontology” picks
up on the theme of patterning and applies it to the biological functions of
plants. Gemma Anderson’s “Relational process drawings,” for example, are made
in collaboration with a cellular biologist and a philosopher of science. They
re-imagine the dynamic patterns of plant life by expressing the relationships
between processes on molecular, cellular and organismal levels as musical
compositions or dance choreographies.
Much has been made of recent research which
shows that plants send each other electrical signals and nutrients through
strands of symbiotic fungi, dubbed the “wood wide web.” The Botanical Mind
Online effectively makes use of this parallel between plant communication and
the internet, using the branching nonlinear structure of a hyperlinked website
to subtly hint at plant forms and create a resource rich in multidirectional
thought. “During this period of enforced stillness,” the curators argue, “our
behavior might be seen to resonate with plants: like them we are now fixed in
one place, subject to new rhythms of time, contemplation, personal growth and
transformation.”
The Botanical Mind Online continues at
www.botanicalmind.online/. The online platform and related upcoming exhibition
at Camden Art Center, London, are curated by Gina Buenfeld and Martin Clark.
https://hyperallergic.com/565756/artists-writers-musicians-and-more-explore-the-intersections-of-art-and-ecology/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=D052620&utm_content=D052620+CID_b5d439c1950e2ca9c8e61863755ac75c&utm_source=HyperallergicNewsletter
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