Plants by Numbers: Art, Computation, and Queer Feminist Technoscience (Biotechne: Interthinking Art, Science and Design) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1350344966 ISBN 13: 9781350344969

Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2025

Synopsis

This open access book takes a queer, feminist, and decolonial technoscience approach to the ecologies that emerge from our entanglements with nonhumans (air, rocks, algae, trees, soil and plants) and computational hard/software. In Plants by Numbers, artists and theorists working with computation address the urgent need to think beyond the human paradigm, opening up new fields of debate that question the troubled relationship between ecosystems and human technology. Organised around three key themes--techno-nature entanglements, plants as resistant agents, and becoming-with-plants--the volume provides a vital pathway through complex theoretical ideas that inform the practices of artists working in the fields of computation and ecology. Fusing art theoretical and art practice approaches, the contributors describe how we might design, make and imagine computational processes differently, or otherwise, through the co-production of artworks with plants. Showing how these artworks might act as communicative media between the biological and technological, Plants by Numbers opens up new potential areas of research whilst producing new ethical-political engagements. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the University of Michigan.

About this title

About the Authors

Jane Prophet is an artist and Professor at Stamps School of Art and Design, University of Michigan, USA. She works across media and disciplines to produce apps, objects and installations, frequently combining traditional and computational media. Prophet’s papers position art in relation to contemporary debates about art, feminist technoscience, artificial life and ubiquitous computing.

Helen V. Pritchard is Professor of Research at Basel Academy of Art and Design, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW). They are the co-editor of Data Browser 06: Executing Practices (2018) and the special issue of Science, Technology and Human Values “Sensors and Sensing Practices” (2019). They organise with The Institute of Technology in the Public Interest.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1350344966
• ISBN 13: 9781350344969
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 284
• Editor: Prophet Jane