Paper short abstract:

The Vegetal Experience project hybridizes botany, plant thinking, dance and visual art in response to two questions: How can movement constitute thought or thought constitute movement? Can there be art neither for humans nor made by humans?

Paper long abstract:

Natalie Jeremijenko's OneTrees Project (http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/onetrees ) is a clever artistic insertion of unruly subjects into the world: actual genetically identical trees in actual sites around the Bay Area, to be cared for by ordinary folks for 30 years. True, this renders plants outside the categories of food, medicine, weed, but as meta-subjects enrolled in the artist's critique of genetic determinism, they are no less anthropocentrically construed.

Can there be art neither for humans nor made by humans? Can there be ethico-aesthetic experiment without a priori subjects, just as novel entities (such as technical inventions) can co-construct their conditions for existence?

Moreover, ecology shows us that point-solutions and point-thinking may solve a problem at a particular site or meet a particular need yet nonetheless yield global catastrophe.

Since 2009, a linked series of media artists, philosophers, filmmakers and programmers have intertwined readings of Spinoza, Goethe and Marder together with experiments with plants, responsive media, and plant life support systems (ironically named) built with water, soil and natural as well as modulated light. We describe recent work with artists from film and dance (Montreal) and media artists and scientists from Synthesis Center ASU, that will in turn inform a future conversation between philosophy and botany.

Keywords: vegetal experience, plant life, movement as thought, ecology, environmental philosophy, film, dance