April 7 - Decomposing and Recomposing Plant/People Futures

Jo will be a guest panelist at the Technoscience Salon-Decomposing and Recomposing Plant/People Futures

Date: Friday April 7, 2017
Time: 4-6 PM
Place: High Park Nature Centre
375 Colborne Lodge Drive

Speakers: Banu Subramaniam (UMass Amherst), Jo SiMalaya Alcampo (Independent Artist) and Shiho Satsuka (University of Toronto)

Stirrers: Johanna Pokorny (University of Toronto) and Duygu Kasdogan (York University)

"In the wake of anxieties about looming ruin and apocalypse, this year’s Technoscience Salon opens up a space for artists, scientists, activists, and scholars to consider anew how it is we grapple with uncertain futures. 

The aim of this series is to summon other ways of doing life by thinking alongside and athwart technoscience. One way to do this is to activate other ways of storying pasts, presents, and futures. 

Eschewing the teleological, progressivist temporalities that have shaped Anthropocene-thinking and the inevitability of apocalypse, this year’s events draw on the themes of composition and decomposition as we reimagine relations among pasts, presents and futures.

We highlight processes of decay to help us think about the crucial role of disintegration and disassembly in the shaping of what might come.  (De)composing futures prompts a decentering of “life” as our primary analytic, and so we look to new ways of thinking between the living, once-lived, and nonliving world. How might an approach to “more-than-life” potentiate other ways of imagining futures?

This year’s events directly engage sites that are potent for thinking alter-life and alter-futures as more-than-life becomings.

In the Spring the Salon will host experiments in plant/human collaboration as we gather plant studies scholars and artists together to imagine ways of doing life in the Planthroposcene, an aspirational episteme in which people learn how to conspire with the plants. We take inspiration from forms of life already in the making in the wake of the Anthropocene concept."