FUTURE PLAN(T)S

25. August – 10. September 2023

The future of our plants is one of humanity’s biggest challenges. What reflections do 18 artists have about this current discourse and the future. of plants? How do we preserve and communicate their biodiversity, what is the role of wild plants, how can agroecology work to sustain cultivated plants? How can the soil be revitalized? What public discussions can we have about these relationships between nutrition, food, and social issues? In this exhibition 18 well-known artists reflect on these questions in the Greenhouse of the Sustainable Agroecosystem Group at the ETHZ. These artworks, films and installations, attempt to raise awareness about the future of plants, soil, nutrition, food, and water, and they reflect contact with the research group in the field of sustainable agrosystems.

This exhibition features two films:
Farm meets Greenhouse (25 mins., 2022)
Aftertaste, The Molecular Orchestra (16.5 mins., 2022)

We also collaborate with the Sustainable Agrosystems Group at the ETHZ to host LaserZurich talks with artists and scientists. The topics are about the future of our plants and controversial issues.

For more information see www.laserzurich.com

TALK ONE

THE FUTURE OF SOIL – PLANT INTERACTIONS
29. August 2023
6.30 – 10.00 pm

TALK TWO

RESILIENCE, NUTRITION, FOOD SYSTEMS
5. September 2023
6.30 – 10.00 pm

Place of Exhibion and Talks

SAE GREENHOUSE
The Sustainable Agrosystems Group: ETHZ
Häldeliweg 19
8044 Zürich
Switzerland

ANNOUNCING Eskin 5 BASEL

House of Electronic Arts HeK, Basel
October, 2019

An Inclusion Project on Media and Ecology
www.hek.ch

Jellyeyes

Evolution and Vision
AR project in BEYOND BORDERS
18. December 2019

Processed Body – Expanded Brain – Distributed Agency
LAZNIA Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdansk (Poland)

Past Lecture at Experimenta Social

12. March 2019
Speaker: Jill Scott

Place
ACMI X, Level 4
2 Kavanagh Street Southbank
Melbourne VIC
AUSTRALIA

Link
www.experimenta.org/experimenta-social

ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE, Vienna

1^st-30^th November 2018

Jill Scott is artist-in-residence in the Q21 Musuems Quarter Vienna for the month of November 2018. There she will conduct Neuromedia workshops on sensory perception at the Digital Art Department at the Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien, University of the Arts Department DIGITALE KUNST. Vienna. The workshops are called: “Enhancing Sensory Perception for Artist and Designers”.

She will also produce an engaging exhibition based on the documentation of Eskin4 the Visually Impaired, a recent project from Durban, South Africa. This project is a collaboration with filmmaker: Marille Hahne.

More information: www.mqw.at

Public guest lecture by Jill Scott: Creative Incubators for a Common Culture

Thursday, 8^th November 2018
14:00 – 15:30 p.m.

at the Department of DIGITALE KUNST
Hintere Zollamtsstraße 17 (3^rd floor)
1030 Wien, Austria
More information: www.digitalekunst.ac.at

Artist in Residence

November 1-30^th 2018
Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien
Department: DIGITALE KUNST

Workshop
November 9-12^th 2018
Enhancing sensory perception for Artist and Designers
By Jill Scott and Marille Hahne

Description
This workshop is a unique blend of sensor systems lab exercises from neuroscience, media arts and design to context ideas. It was designed by Jill Scott to raise body awareness for those students who are interested in neuroscience and cognition. It may help them incorporate users or interactive viewers in the actual processes of construction. Students will attend lectures and work in pairs to develop media art and digital design projects about sensory perception. The workshop participants will focus on the understanding and stimulation of three neural systems, the Peripheral Nervous System (PNS), the Central Nervous System (CNS) and the Automated Nervous System. The aim is to help artists and designers think differently about sensory stimuli past old fashioned interaction ideas of cause and effect, and to understand cross-modal sensory interaction. The following themes are explored–Sight | Observation, saccade movements, blink and light reflex reaction, the blind spot, visual acuity, eye dominance, visual impairment and photoreceptor adaptation. Taste | Understanding taste receptors, relation of taste to visual, olfactory response, trigeminal (hot, cool). Mechanical contributions to “sapictive” perception, location, distribution and thresholds of taste. Smell | The act of odor detection, smell and taste, adapted nostrils, somatic mapping, chemo-sensors and the role of cilia. Touch | Reception, distribution of touch receptors, tactile discrimination, temperature, pressure and vibration. Sound | Deafness, localization and eco-location, inner ear interpretation and action potentials, bone conduction and substitution. Proprioception | Balance reflex, relative position from tactility, movement and mind body centering, sensing the bodies edge and environmental effects on the body.

Former Workshops include
School of Visual Arts NY (2013), Rutgers School of Art NY (2014) Nan Yang University, Singapore (2016), Tasmanian School of Art, Hobart (2017), Universität für angewandte Kunst, Vienna.

Recent work at ISEA
The International Symposium on Electronic Art: Eskin4 the Visually Impaired at the National Science Museum Research Center, DURBAN SOUTH AFRICA (See Current Artworks).

KEYNOTE
SPECTRA Art + Science 2018, Sponsored by ANAT

Wed 10^th October
Adelaide, Australia
spectra.org.au

Creative Incubators for a Common Culture

Prof. Dr. Jill Scott defines a creative incubator as a warm physical space and a psychological environment conductive to a growing collaboration between art and science practitioners and theorists. This incubator is an interspatial zone that encourages creative experiment building the sharing of findings through interactive, often disciplinary-specific technology combined with an increase in intuitive unspoken methods as well as “tacit” and “situated” knowhow-transfer (Polanyi 1958- Harding 2005). In this talk Scott uses scientific research alongside specific art examples from Australia and overseas to cross correlate the various roles of an incubator. In neurobiology, an incubator is used to regulate temperature, air circulation, oxygen levels and humidity; controlling the conditions that can help a premature life to grow, change or survive, but in theoretical physics, it is a research factory of talents, one that contributes every day to advance knowledge on matters such as the production of energy. However, an incubator also has feminist connotations: surrogate mothers for example, often regard their wombs as incubators in order to separate their maternal feelings from the offspring inside them, a perspective that underlines the dominance of the patriarchy. Also as Bruno Latour posits, there are the macro-connotations, like our catastrophic realities of the Anthropocene, which portray the whole earth as a giant incubator, one in which the humans are doing the warming! (Latour 2012). Scott’s version of the creative incubator incorporates all these interpretations, but foremost it is a space of mutual understanding for discussion and practice of not just new inventions and discoveries, but those matters which are unformed and in-process, difficult to describe even in the language of one’s “home” discipline. Certainly, as our “natural” environments become more complex and less sustainable, there is an increasing need to join a “commons network” where we can re-design representations of the “artificial” and collaborate on new “wet” experiments that explore how our sensory processes can cope with this increasing complexity. What kind of artists and scientists are willing to blur conventional boundaries and familiar practices to participate in such creative incubators? As Scott suggests, it is only those who can think critically AND laterally!