ALISON BENNETT
’VEGETAL/DIGITAL’
13 JANUARY - 4 FEBRUARY, 2022
Alison Bennett, vegetal/digital, (Waratah), screen capture of photogrammetry point-cloud. Image courtesy of the artist, 2021.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Exploring vegetal thinking, digital gardening and post-human neuroqueer phenomenology through the affordances of expanded photography, artist Alison Bennett considers native blossoms as celestial encounters.
Alison Bennett, vegetal/digital (Silver Princess), video screen capture of photogrammetry point-cloud, 2021.
Alison Bennett, vegetal/digital (Waratah), video screen capture of photogrammetry point-cloud, 2021.
TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF VEGETAL/DIGITAL
Exploring vegetal thinking, digital gardening and post-human neuroqueer phenomenology through the affordances of expanded photography, artist Alison Bennett considers Australian native flowers as celestial encounters. Slowly rotating 3D point-clouds of floral forms coalesce and dissolve – the authenticity of the image as loosely aligned imprecise points of reference folded into the immersive field of extended reality mediation. Rendered as point-cloud models, foliage structures resonate as vibrant matter, testing the affordances of the digital image as a field of thinking.
In this collaborative piece of writing, we are seeking to articulate a conceptual connection between the vegetal and the digital, as proposed by a body of works developed by artist Alison Bennett. As Bennett explains, the work originally arose out of the heightened sensory perceptions of extended lock-down, and that this creative investigation began with contemplation of flowering street-trees during these precious forays outdoors.
Alison Bennett, vegetal/digital (Silver Princess), video, 1:29 min. 2021.
Alison Bennett, vegetal/digital (Silver Princess), photogrammetry point-cloud online interactive, 2021.
Through 262 days of lock-down, residents of Melbourne retreated to the hyper-local, often reinforced by a five kilometer travel bubble and a one-hour daily time-limit outdoors. It was as if nature was magnified in the place of social connections. Affording a chance for a power shift that re-balanced ecology, lockdowns created an unusually quiet environment in cities that previously bustled with human noise and engines. The sublime ephemeral springtime flowers of street-trees were amplified by the extreme sensory and social constraints of social distancing. We attuned to the contained glowing pulse of plants, drawn into a suspended moment of slow encounter.
In this body of work, Bennett engages with ‘vegetal thinking’, a concept of critical plant studies that considers our symbiotic relationship with plants (Gibson 2018). This theoretical context is placed alongside the practice of ‘digital gardening’, of “seeds of thought cultivated in public” (Ness Labs) through slow thinking and organic speculation. Indeed, these domains of the vegetal and digital come together in post-human philosophy (Haraway 2016) and notions of compost and soil, seeking to subvert subject/object dichotomies. Mediated through an autistic queer lens (Yergeau 2018), Bennett’s work sides with the object, creating encounters that collapse the spectral, floral and machinic.
Alison Bennett, vegetal/digital (Grevillea Robusta), video, 3:57 min, 2021
Alison Bennett, vegetal/digital (Grevillea Robusta), photogrammetry point-cloud online interactive, 2021
For artists, thinkers and makers, examining the vegetal-digital affords an opportunity to move beyond representation, to speculate in a material space that re-works conventional perceptions of the non-human. Bennett imagines the ‘non-human’ in two complementary aspects: vegetal and digital, or, in other words, the organic and ‘technoetic’ (Ascott 1997). A new approach to the vegetal is at play, one that takes us beyond conceptions of plants within the Western philosophical tradition as passive and purely aesthetic.
Alison Bennett, vegetal/digital (Waratah), video, 3:33 min, 2021
Alison Bennett, vegetal/digital (Waratah), photogrammetry point-cloud online interactive, 2021
Bennett cites the work of Val Plumwood as influential in her thinking. Contrary to the traditional hierarchical conceptions of consciousness and value within the western philosophical tradition, Australian philosopher Val Plumwood adopted what could be termed an animist framework that placed all living things - animals, plants, indeed ecosystems - as of equal value in which humans are just another creature. Beyond multi-species justice, she proposed that agency and life force exist within all matter. Plumwood’s work preceded that of posthuman theorists Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, who posit a more-than-human framework that considers the ways in which non-human organisms enact situated agency, challenging the traditional Humanist conceptions of superiority vested in a ‘brain-situated’ consciousness.
Reflecting on the sources of her work, Bennett related a childhood story of the friendship between her mother Joan Staples, an environmental activist, and Val Plumwood.
Whilst I was not reading Plumwood’s work as a young person, my understanding of my place in the world was informed by listening to their conversations about eco-feminism and ecological thought. Val spent some time in our house recovering from surviving an encounter with a crocodile in Kakadu National Park in the mid 1980s. Published posthumously, Val reflected on this experience in The Eye of the Crocodile (2012), that she gained a deeply embodied understanding that we are part of the food cycle. “[B]eing in your body is—like having a volume out from the library, a volume subject to more or less instant recall by other borrowers—who rewrite the whole story when they get it" (Plumwood 2012 p.35).
Alison Bennett, vegetal/digital (Wattle), video, 8:00 min, 2021.
Alison Bennett, vegetal/digital (Wattle), photogrammetry point-cloud online interactive, 2021
Haraway also invokes compost as a form of intercorporeality that echoes Plumwood’s image of the library of borrowed bodies. Plumwood’s approach pioneers the intersectional eco-feminism that Haraway and others explore in the posthuman paradigm, where nonhuman animals are on equal footing in a framework of multispecies justice.
In seeking to connect the vegetal and the digital, Bennett points the trajectory of Haraway’s thinking from cyborg to compost, speculating that our conception of the digital requires alignment with the material. Key to this alignment is the discussion of transmateriality articulated by Anna Munster and Mitchell Whitelaw who propose the digital as a transformed form of materiality rather than that of dematerialisation. Extending this, we propose that the digital affords an expanded mode of materiality that goes beyond the aesthetics of representation. The digital has the potential to invert conventional senses of materiality in art praxis. We argue that in the digital sense of materiality, Bennett’s glowing point clouds of flowers transpose physical materiality to what we term ‘voxel dimensions’. Vegetal-digital suggests a corporeal experience of plants in voxel dimensions, where the digital space is not considered as immaterial, as dissolved of matter. Instead, voxel dimensions transpose plants into vibrant matter (Jane Bennett 2008), where the digital material is immanent – the spectral and the embodied are indivisible. The digital is a form of vibrant matter, just as flowers shimmer with ephemeral transience.
Text by Alison Bennett and Rewa Wright
Alison Bennett, vegetal/digital (Hakea), video, 2:08 min, 2021.
Alison Bennett, vegetal/digital (Hakea), photogrammetry point-cloud online interactive, 2021.
Alison Bennett, vegetal/digital, installation view, 2022. Photography by Jek Maurer.
Alison Bennett, vegetal/digital, installation view, 2022. Photography by Jek Maurer.
Alison Bennett, vegetal/digital, installation view, 2022. . Kieran Butler, 80 years from now, installation view, 2022. Photography by Jek Maurer.
Exhibition essay by Alison Bennett and Rewa Wright
Roomsheet
BIO
For further information about Alison Bennett’s practice
PODCAST
This episode of Opening drinks sees a thoughtful conversation around ‘posts’, the mechanisms of photography and vegetal thinking. Our speakers, interactive designer Dr Rewa Wright and neuroqueer new media artist Dr Alison Bennett also reflect on the interconnectivity between humans, the virtual and the material.
This podcast was produced alongside Alison Bennett’s exhibition, Vegeta//Digital. Exploring vegetal thinking, digital gardening and post-human neuroqueer phenomenology through the affordances of expanded photography, artist Alison Bennett considers native blossoms as celestial encounters.
Dr. Rewa Wright
Dr. Rewa Wright is an interaction designer and media artist with a specific interest in new technologies of computer vision, gestural interfaces, embodiment and ecology. Her practice based research takes a playful approach to emerging technologies, with a focus on exploration through tactile materiality. Rewa's artworks have been included in various Ars Electronica ‘Gardens’ (2020 and 2021), the SIGGRAPH Asia Art Gallery (2019), Leonardo LASER events, and in numerous iterations of the International Symposium in Electronic Art (since 2014).