Exploring the Eco-Digital: Performative Sensing with Plants and Data

Abstract

Artistic practices influenced by philosophical understandings that extend g'beyond the human', such as posthuman and post-Anthropocene approaches, partially connect on a qualitative level with ancient understandings of an expanded nature that engulfs both human and nonhuman kin. Preserved in Indigenous epistemes, such as matauranga Maori (Maori knowledge), this research brings selected aspects of this complex knowledge system into contact with artistic practice generated with networked technologies, to manifest speculative methods of data visualization and signal flow. While there are many different approaches of the eco-digital currently at play, this research looks at practices engaging plants as co-composers. Articulating various situational assemblages that entangle humans, plants, and data, this paper explores theoretical positions that cross-pollinate natural ecology and digital technology. We do this through the prism of two iterative works by the authors: Contact/Sense (2019) and Nga manawataki o te koiora: Biorhythms (2022).