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Paper short abstract

The presentation examines new media artworks that make ecological phenomena (such as mycorrhiza or VOC) perceptible; facilitate scientific research and art collaborations; provide opportunities for diverse forms of plant–human communication, while facing key challenges of Anthropocene aesthetics.

Paper long abstract

Can new media art make visible and audible how trees communicate with each other, how underground mycorrhizal networks spread, or how plants send messages to other organisms through volatile organic compounds (VOCs)? Increasingly, digital artworks seek to address these ecological hot topics. Yet do such installations genuinely foster the acknowledgment of plants’ agency and challenge ingrained assumptions of ’plants’ fixity, passivity, and resilient silent presence’? While cultural representations had long reinforced these reductionisms, plants’ presence in contemporary art also enables us to challenge them and offers the opportunity to overturn this very contingancy or at least take it as a productive starting point around which to conceive plant-being from new perspectives (Aloi 2020).

Digital installations have an important educational impact when thematizing trending phenomena such as the “Wood Wide Web” or VOC-mediated communication. However, I argue that this medium also allows for more sophisticated artistic reflections. Accordingly, I examine two additional conceptual approaches: first, collaborations between scientific research and art through plant-friendly ’digital twin’ technologies; and second, the diverse forms of plant–human communication that can be enabled in new media artworks.

Furthermore, the artistic forms we give to plant-beings stand in a metonymic parallel with the three main challenges of Anthropocene aesthetics: latency, entanglement, and scale (the clash of incompatible orders of magnitude) (Horn 2020) — my presentation also takes this correlation into account.