Think that plants have no feelings? Think again. In the new show "Psychobotany," currently on view at Machine Project
in Los Angeles, people from diverse arenas tackle the subject through
sight, sound, taste, live performances and even human thought. From
Botanicalls' plants that call for help and Cleve Backster's 1960s
experiments with plants and polygraphs to the recent development of
"sentinel plants" by the Pentagon, the exhibit covers the ongoing
attempts by humans to connect to plant life.
While "Psychobotany" is not where one will get a how-to crash course on preparing hallucinogenics (though plants with psychotropic properties are on display), visitors do have the opportunity to affect the well-being of plants during the run of the show, while other pieces - one of which dates back to the early 1900s - illustrate the ways in which people have transformed our green neighbors into enemies, pets, sacred objects and art collaborators.
Helio Mag's Teena Apeles stops by Machine to visit with "Psychobotany" curator Aaron Gach, cofounder of the San Francisco–based art collective Center for Tactical Magic (CTM) who gives her the lowdown on the protologism and how to stunt the growth of a tomato plant with her mind.
Plant a seed after the jump!
Helio: Tell me about the term psychobotany. Is this something you coined?
Gach: Yes, psycho is derived from the Greek term psyche, sometimes interpreted as “mind” and sometimes as “soul,” it kind of exists in between the two for the Greeks, and then, of course, botany is the study of plants.
Helio: You brought an interesting group of people together to participate.
Gach: This show is isn’t just about artists working with plants. We have people in the sciences, amateur scientists, people who are approaching it from the spiritual or metaphysical aspect, people who are contemporary artists and a whole mix of people in between. So it’s really a cultural survey of humans attempting to communicate with plants in some way.
Helio: Where shall we start?
Gach: You come in, and there are a bunch of audio players… over the house speakers there’s a CD playing by New York–based artist Peter Coffin called Music for Plants, featuring musicians and sound artists who performed in a greenhouse to communicate with plants through musical composition or improvisation. He also contributed Shared: Reflection/Refraction, a conceptual art premise inspired by people like Cleve Backster—we’ll get to him later—but we have a bell speaker projecting different colors to the plant. There have been lots of research on people’s abilities to project emotions onto plants or to plants, and people also have emotional reactions when they hear colors. So as you stand in front of the plant, you have an emotional response that presumably the plant then feels. Another interpretation of this project is plants thrive on light and when you break light down you end up with its constituent colors, and Coffin is processing visual light into audio language and projecting it back on the plant. This is to get us thinking about how information gets broken down and distilled and reassembled, and kind of asks us what that relationship might be to nature.
Helio: And on this wall to the right, with the machine? This is Backster?
Gach: Backster is not an artist and would definitely not consider himself an artist and was a little reluctant to participate in the exhibition because it’s in a space that among other things is known for doing art shows. He’s 82 I think now and his full-time profession is running a school for law enforcement doing lie detection—polygraph machines—the Backster School of Lie Detection. He worked for the government and was trained by the CIA. The reason he’s in this show is because in the sixties he began hooking up plants to lie detectors to see if he could get responses and he found he could. He’s been generous enough to give us some prints and tracings of the files he’s done.
Helio: What was he hoping to achieve?
Gach: He was more or less trying to prove that plants were capable of responding in ways that parallel human consciousness. So one of the things that happened is his earlier experiments, he noticed that when he thought about burning a leaf it already registered on the chart before he even got the matches or began lighting the leaves. Just the thought processes were enough to get it to register. He’s very focused, he spent a lifetime trying to set up experiments that would be accepted by the science community but he’s dealing with collaborators who don’t always want to collaborate. I think his whole practice, the whole social practice really has a dark side and a light side, I think it speaks volumes that there is this sort of interrogation of nature that’s happening. The tools that are used on suspects are set upon plants and that some way nature is being treated with suspicion in a way of hopefully understanding nature more. The brighter side to the coin is that he is taking tools that are typically used for interrogation purposes and using them for a different purpose, hopefully to understand the relationship to the world around us that goes beyond just good and evil or criminal and law enforcement.
Helio: And the various images on this wall to the left? Can you talk about a few.
Gach: This is kind of the curatorial context wall. A bunch of different expressions of human-plant communication over the ages. The Greek god Pan and George Washington Carver, who today is still considered one of two premier agricultural scientists in the US, he’s most famous for coming up with more than 300 different uses for the peanut. This is a yarn painting from the Huichol community in Mexico, an indigenous community that is often considered the originators of the peyote ritual. They still do a peyote pilgrimage every year and do these fantastic psychedelic expressions of their visions. Here is Moses talking to the burning bush… and a different interpretation of the burning bush (referring to Peter Tosh’s 1970 album cover for Legalize It). And this Biological Input/Output Systems (BIOS) Program is from DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, which is the Pentagon’s biggest kind of budget-gobbling research development center. They do all of the military research development. Most of your tax money goes to this. And they did a project to develop “sentinel plants.” Basically we turned plants into spies having them respond to environmental triggers. They are sort of the newest recruits in our war on terror so to speak.
Helio: What is the oldest piece in the show?
Gach: These illustrations are “plant autographs” from the pioneer of human-plant communication particularly within the science community, a Bengali scientist from India, Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose. He lived during the late 1800s and early 1900s and developed these incredible instruments that he would hook up to plants basically where he would enable plants to draw their own responses on graphs as they responded to different stimuli. Sometimes light, sometimes music, he was the first one known to play music to plants and observe how it affected growth. Initially his work was completely discredited by the science community, but his research was so good that ultimately not only was his work validated, but the Royal Society in Great Britain made him a fellow, also in Austria.
Helio: Can you explain the “shy” plants in the greenhouse.
Gach: It is the work of Denise King, who does exhibitions and development at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. It is a mimosa greenhouse and it’s set up so people can sit down and use a variety of different implements on the mimosa plant. You can see the reaction pretty quickly, see how the leaves close up when you touch them. If they’re over stimulated they’ll drop their whole stem.
Helio: Were there any plants harmed in the show?
Gach: There is actually one in the process, from the CTM, our Vital Psigns installation. It’s modeled after experiments done in the seventies. The way this works is visitors over the course of the exhibition would come in and have a seat at the bench and project negative thoughts to the NEGATIVE plant and positive thoughts toward the POSITIVE plant and see if we can get results by the end of the exhibition. This has been installed four or five times. For CTM what’s important is the relational space where people explore the idea of projecting thoughts and empathy with plants, and trying to figure out what a plant would find negative or positive. And taking just a few moments out of the day to basically stare at a plant and think about affecting change. The results have always been what you see right now, which is the negative plant is fairly stunted, the control plant (that gets no special attention) typically does fine, the positive typically does fine. Sometimes the positive does better, sometimes the control does better. And this is no way gimmicked. The three plants have equal watering systems, fresh batteries and equal light. As far as I’m concerned, if the negative plant flourishes in a space it says its own set of things and I think that’s fine. I’m not overly committed to the negative plant doing poorly in any way. I think it’s significant that the negative plant every time we’ve done this has all but perished or at least been stunted.
Helio: Do visitors feel sad about the demise of the plant or is the process therapeutic for some?
Gach: We get both. I’ve had people express gratitude to be given the opportunity to vent at something, to consciously relax and get out a lot of negative energy. It’s set up that when you come into the space you’re reading left to right—you start out negatively and come out positively. But there are plenty of people who feel really guilty about projecting negative thoughts towards the plant.
Helio: Are they saboteurs then?
Gach: There are people who have said, “I can’t help but root for an underdog,” so there is definitely that kind of relationship. This is set up not as a science experiment, it has the bare minimum of controls and objectivity. It really is set up as a social experiment. So there’s an effort made to have a control with equal water and lights and what not but there’s no way you can monitor what people think and what people project to it. So the results are really subjective even though they appear really objective. So people come in and make their own associations.
Helio: I’ve noticed more performances and installations involving plants over the last decade. Do you think it is in part related to the rise of the green movement?
Gach: I think so. I think there is a swing back in that direction. There’s definitely a lot of talk about global climate change right now. So I think people are very conscious of that and we’ve been at war for six years and I think given the context of living in a state of war people kind of start looking at life and reaffirm growth and living instead of killing. So I think that’s one way it starts to seep back into peoples’ consciousness, not as a direct kind of antiwar stance but as a way of maintaining a kind of balance whether they’re aware of it or not.
Helio: What has the response been so far to “Psychobotany?”
Gach: It’s been incredible. The opening was packed. There were kids in the audience, lots of art people, people from the sciences who were curious about how info was being presented. We had lots of earthy people who were interested in either gardening or metaphysics or in hallucinogenics.
Helio: Do the pieces comprise just a fraction of the people you reached out to for the show?
Gach: There are definitely more people who I asked to be involved in different ways. I think this is the initial exhibition of hopefully an ever-expanding exhibition. We launched www.psychobotany.com to begin to map out this cultural terrain.
Psychobotany
Through June 17
Machine Project http://machineproject.com
1200 D North Alvarado Street
Los Angeles, CA 90026
213.483.8761
While "Psychobotany" is not where one will get a how-to crash course on preparing hallucinogenics (though plants with psychotropic properties are on display), visitors do have the opportunity to affect the well-being of plants during the run of the show, while other pieces - one of which dates back to the early 1900s - illustrate the ways in which people have transformed our green neighbors into enemies, pets, sacred objects and art collaborators.
Helio Mag's Teena Apeles stops by Machine to visit with "Psychobotany" curator Aaron Gach, cofounder of the San Francisco–based art collective Center for Tactical Magic (CTM) who gives her the lowdown on the protologism and how to stunt the growth of a tomato plant with her mind.
Plant a seed after the jump!
Helio: Tell me about the term psychobotany. Is this something you coined?
Gach: Yes, psycho is derived from the Greek term psyche, sometimes interpreted as “mind” and sometimes as “soul,” it kind of exists in between the two for the Greeks, and then, of course, botany is the study of plants.
Helio: You brought an interesting group of people together to participate.
Gach: This show is isn’t just about artists working with plants. We have people in the sciences, amateur scientists, people who are approaching it from the spiritual or metaphysical aspect, people who are contemporary artists and a whole mix of people in between. So it’s really a cultural survey of humans attempting to communicate with plants in some way.
Helio: Where shall we start?
Gach: You come in, and there are a bunch of audio players… over the house speakers there’s a CD playing by New York–based artist Peter Coffin called Music for Plants, featuring musicians and sound artists who performed in a greenhouse to communicate with plants through musical composition or improvisation. He also contributed Shared: Reflection/Refraction, a conceptual art premise inspired by people like Cleve Backster—we’ll get to him later—but we have a bell speaker projecting different colors to the plant. There have been lots of research on people’s abilities to project emotions onto plants or to plants, and people also have emotional reactions when they hear colors. So as you stand in front of the plant, you have an emotional response that presumably the plant then feels. Another interpretation of this project is plants thrive on light and when you break light down you end up with its constituent colors, and Coffin is processing visual light into audio language and projecting it back on the plant. This is to get us thinking about how information gets broken down and distilled and reassembled, and kind of asks us what that relationship might be to nature.
Helio: And on this wall to the right, with the machine? This is Backster?
Gach: Backster is not an artist and would definitely not consider himself an artist and was a little reluctant to participate in the exhibition because it’s in a space that among other things is known for doing art shows. He’s 82 I think now and his full-time profession is running a school for law enforcement doing lie detection—polygraph machines—the Backster School of Lie Detection. He worked for the government and was trained by the CIA. The reason he’s in this show is because in the sixties he began hooking up plants to lie detectors to see if he could get responses and he found he could. He’s been generous enough to give us some prints and tracings of the files he’s done.
Helio: What was he hoping to achieve?
Gach: He was more or less trying to prove that plants were capable of responding in ways that parallel human consciousness. So one of the things that happened is his earlier experiments, he noticed that when he thought about burning a leaf it already registered on the chart before he even got the matches or began lighting the leaves. Just the thought processes were enough to get it to register. He’s very focused, he spent a lifetime trying to set up experiments that would be accepted by the science community but he’s dealing with collaborators who don’t always want to collaborate. I think his whole practice, the whole social practice really has a dark side and a light side, I think it speaks volumes that there is this sort of interrogation of nature that’s happening. The tools that are used on suspects are set upon plants and that some way nature is being treated with suspicion in a way of hopefully understanding nature more. The brighter side to the coin is that he is taking tools that are typically used for interrogation purposes and using them for a different purpose, hopefully to understand the relationship to the world around us that goes beyond just good and evil or criminal and law enforcement.
Helio: And the various images on this wall to the left? Can you talk about a few.
Gach: This is kind of the curatorial context wall. A bunch of different expressions of human-plant communication over the ages. The Greek god Pan and George Washington Carver, who today is still considered one of two premier agricultural scientists in the US, he’s most famous for coming up with more than 300 different uses for the peanut. This is a yarn painting from the Huichol community in Mexico, an indigenous community that is often considered the originators of the peyote ritual. They still do a peyote pilgrimage every year and do these fantastic psychedelic expressions of their visions. Here is Moses talking to the burning bush… and a different interpretation of the burning bush (referring to Peter Tosh’s 1970 album cover for Legalize It). And this Biological Input/Output Systems (BIOS) Program is from DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, which is the Pentagon’s biggest kind of budget-gobbling research development center. They do all of the military research development. Most of your tax money goes to this. And they did a project to develop “sentinel plants.” Basically we turned plants into spies having them respond to environmental triggers. They are sort of the newest recruits in our war on terror so to speak.
Helio: What is the oldest piece in the show?
Gach: These illustrations are “plant autographs” from the pioneer of human-plant communication particularly within the science community, a Bengali scientist from India, Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose. He lived during the late 1800s and early 1900s and developed these incredible instruments that he would hook up to plants basically where he would enable plants to draw their own responses on graphs as they responded to different stimuli. Sometimes light, sometimes music, he was the first one known to play music to plants and observe how it affected growth. Initially his work was completely discredited by the science community, but his research was so good that ultimately not only was his work validated, but the Royal Society in Great Britain made him a fellow, also in Austria.
Helio: Can you explain the “shy” plants in the greenhouse.
Gach: It is the work of Denise King, who does exhibitions and development at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. It is a mimosa greenhouse and it’s set up so people can sit down and use a variety of different implements on the mimosa plant. You can see the reaction pretty quickly, see how the leaves close up when you touch them. If they’re over stimulated they’ll drop their whole stem.
Helio: Were there any plants harmed in the show?
Gach: There is actually one in the process, from the CTM, our Vital Psigns installation. It’s modeled after experiments done in the seventies. The way this works is visitors over the course of the exhibition would come in and have a seat at the bench and project negative thoughts to the NEGATIVE plant and positive thoughts toward the POSITIVE plant and see if we can get results by the end of the exhibition. This has been installed four or five times. For CTM what’s important is the relational space where people explore the idea of projecting thoughts and empathy with plants, and trying to figure out what a plant would find negative or positive. And taking just a few moments out of the day to basically stare at a plant and think about affecting change. The results have always been what you see right now, which is the negative plant is fairly stunted, the control plant (that gets no special attention) typically does fine, the positive typically does fine. Sometimes the positive does better, sometimes the control does better. And this is no way gimmicked. The three plants have equal watering systems, fresh batteries and equal light. As far as I’m concerned, if the negative plant flourishes in a space it says its own set of things and I think that’s fine. I’m not overly committed to the negative plant doing poorly in any way. I think it’s significant that the negative plant every time we’ve done this has all but perished or at least been stunted.
Helio: Do visitors feel sad about the demise of the plant or is the process therapeutic for some?
Gach: We get both. I’ve had people express gratitude to be given the opportunity to vent at something, to consciously relax and get out a lot of negative energy. It’s set up that when you come into the space you’re reading left to right—you start out negatively and come out positively. But there are plenty of people who feel really guilty about projecting negative thoughts towards the plant.
Helio: Are they saboteurs then?
Gach: There are people who have said, “I can’t help but root for an underdog,” so there is definitely that kind of relationship. This is set up not as a science experiment, it has the bare minimum of controls and objectivity. It really is set up as a social experiment. So there’s an effort made to have a control with equal water and lights and what not but there’s no way you can monitor what people think and what people project to it. So the results are really subjective even though they appear really objective. So people come in and make their own associations.
Helio: I’ve noticed more performances and installations involving plants over the last decade. Do you think it is in part related to the rise of the green movement?
Gach: I think so. I think there is a swing back in that direction. There’s definitely a lot of talk about global climate change right now. So I think people are very conscious of that and we’ve been at war for six years and I think given the context of living in a state of war people kind of start looking at life and reaffirm growth and living instead of killing. So I think that’s one way it starts to seep back into peoples’ consciousness, not as a direct kind of antiwar stance but as a way of maintaining a kind of balance whether they’re aware of it or not.
Helio: What has the response been so far to “Psychobotany?”
Gach: It’s been incredible. The opening was packed. There were kids in the audience, lots of art people, people from the sciences who were curious about how info was being presented. We had lots of earthy people who were interested in either gardening or metaphysics or in hallucinogenics.
Helio: Do the pieces comprise just a fraction of the people you reached out to for the show?
Gach: There are definitely more people who I asked to be involved in different ways. I think this is the initial exhibition of hopefully an ever-expanding exhibition. We launched www.psychobotany.com to begin to map out this cultural terrain.
Psychobotany
Through June 17
Machine Project http://machineproject.com
1200 D North Alvarado Street
Los Angeles, CA 90026
213.483.8761
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THE DOCUMENTATION OF MEMORY: The Art of José Parlá
Combining the elegance of calligraphy with the energy of the urban streets, José Parlá has evolved from graffiti writer to fine artist, in the process creating his own unique vision. Helio talks to Parlá about the evolution of his work.
("Passage Through Memory", mixed media on wood, 4' x 6')
Helio: Let's start with how you feel your work has been evolving over the years, which direction it's moved in and where it initiated.
Parlá: On a subconscious level my work was initiated when I was 9 years old in Miami, Florida. I was influenced directly with what was going on in my neighborhood. I saw amazing colorful paintings on walls, trucks, the park, the school yard and around the streets of the neighborhood in Cutler Ridge. Soon I understood this was a style of art I could get into. I became a writer in the year 1983 and have been painting since then.
("Passage Through Memory" detail, mixed media on wood, 4' x 6')
Throughout the years my work has evolved by practicing new ideas and techniques related to calligraphy styles. In the early 1990s my brother Rey Parlá made a film titled Sporadic Germination. It is a Super 8mm hand-painted scratch film. To see the way the layers function in the films in terms of movement was inspiring to me. I had been studying painting at SCAD in Savannah, Georgia, and also at The New World School of the Arts in Miami. My brother had been taking many pictures for years and also making films. When I came back to visit Miami I ended up with a studio on Lincoln Road in Miami Beach and this is where my brother says I taught him about the layering of a painting and its history; it stuck with him.
My professors in these schools stressed that a good painting must contain much history. I interpreted that what they meant by history was a history told through a procedure of layering, a kind of storytelling.
See and read more after the jump...
Almost 20 Questions/Comments for The Shins
With their new album blowing up the charts and a tour in progress, James Mercer of The Shins took time out to answer some pivotal inquiries.
Helio interrogates after the jump...
