Plants by Numbers Art, Computation, and Queer Feminist Technoscience

"This open access book takes a queer feminist technoscience approach to the ecologies that emerge from our entanglements with nonhumans (air, rocks, algae, trees, soil and plants) and computational hard/software. Artists, feminist techno-scientists and theorists working with computation, Plants by Numbers address the current 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. Taking art theoretical and art practice approaches, contributors describe how we might design, make and imagine computational processes differently, or otherwise, through the co-production of artworks with plants. The authors show how these artworks open up new potentialities, and anti-colonial perspectives in the ways they engage with the contested sites of knowing and unknowing in technoscience. Describing in detail how we might design computational processes differently, the book shows how these artworks might act as communicative media between the biological and technological, thus opening up new potential areas of research whilst producing new ethical-political engagements"--