Špela Petrič
Meta.Morf 2024 – [up]Loaded Bodies / Kjøpmannsgata Ung Kunst / Conference April 19 / Curator: Zane Cerpina
Plant Machines: Explorations of New Intimacies Within the Vegetariat
While the idea that regimes of quantification are essential elements of biopolitics is over half a century old, the technological advances of recent decades have propelled population data collection from the confines of traditional institutions of normalisation (medicine, law enforcement, education, factories) into all spheres of society. For networked, interest-driven biopower, workers-consumers have become the primary producers of data, the so-called natural resource of the raw digital material. In the process of automated control, individuals merge into the vegetariat—the statistical body often non-consensually subjected to analysis, which in turn produces the leverage needed to manage it. Plants are part of the vegetariat, too – in agriculture as well as indoor jungles, green shopping centers, and golf courses, they are monitored by smart irrigation systems, integrated greenhouse sensors, machine vision applications, and logistics optimization algorithms. Technology keeps an eye on plant bodies to ensure their healthy and abundant growth.
But despite the seemingly unidirectional vector of power from states and platforms to the vegetariat, relationships are far from immutable. Positioned in between interests and the biomass, algorithms are promiscuous by nature; while mostly working for those who write them, they could just as well prompt an upheaval or serve a different mistress. In line with this promiscuity, the liaisons of houseplants and technological elements presented in the talk stray from the common sense of algorithmic utility in the pursuit of pleasure and new intimacies within the vegetariat.
Špela Petrič (SI) is a Slovenian new media artist with a background in the natural sciences. Her artistic work combines biomedia practices and performativity to enact strange relations between bodies that reveal the underpinnings of our (bio)technological societies and propose alternatives. Petrič has received several awards, such as the White Aphroid for outstanding artistic achievement (Slovenia), the Bioart and Design Award (Netherlands), and an Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica (Austria).
Header graphics: From “PL’AI,” cucumbers overgrowing AI-robot, ZKM, 2022. Photo by Špela Petrič.
Portrait Photograph by Anže Sekelj.