This event takes the form of a seminar followed by a concert by Robert Blatt and Carla Cao. The seminar presents the research context, methods, and lines of inquiry developed by the artists, while the concert offers a live presentation of their work in practice.

Oenothera (working title) is an ongoing, process-based sound art project informed by plant acoustics. The project integrates bioacoustic research into an artistic practice that is critical and non-anthropocentric through performances, installations, writing, lectures, and workshops.

The project engages with scientific studies suggesting that plants perceive ecologically relevant sounds, such as pollinators, herbivores, and water. It explores a non-anthropocentric sonic perspective that challenges human-centered notions of authorship, audience, and material. This work considers expanded artistic paradigms where artworks may occur beyond the frequency range of human vision or sound perception and may extend to touch, heat, humidity, or other sensory possibilities found only in non-human lifeforms.

It incorporates experimental recording setups for substrate-borne sounds on plants including laser Doppler vibrometers, gramophone cartridges, and piezoelectric microphones. These vibrational sounds recorded on plants are played back via tactile transducers to simulate how plants listen over their whole body. Ethical considerations are central to the practice, as the artists acknowledge that anthropogenic sounds may interfere with biological activities of plants and that introducing any form of anthropogenic sound, noise, or music, has the potential for deleterious effects.

Program:

19:00h - seminar (in English)

20:00h - concert 

About the artists:

Carla Cao is a PhD candidate of philosophy in the Universidad de Murcia. She is interested in sound perception in plants and in developing a plant acoustic research paradigm informed by ecological psychology and embodied cognition. Her academic background is in music composition, music cognition, and biology with a focus on botany.

Robert Blatt (b. 1984 in Anaheim, CA) is an artist, musician, and writer. His practice investigates sound and listening through diverse media, intersecting concerns such as environment, community, and language.

Supported by: