May 6, 2024

Notes on Plant Life*

introducing notes*, a segment inside of new terms & conditions to live within the footnotes and the archives that feed this study, through/with alternative histories and practices.¹ new terms & conditions allows me the space to wildly make meaning of many different parts toward a singular definition of the terms i present here. today’s issue is fitting as i relaunch my creative studio as citation studio (more soon!) to foreground Black feminist thought in relationship to and between computing, memory, and nature.²

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This project started as a speculative fiction short story about a plant communicating with a server in a server farm. i imagined the chemical run-off from the farm, with the whirring air conditioners that have to run constantly, had seeped into the earth. the seepage had made contact with the root system of this particular plant, making it possible to communicate with the root server. i wanted to explore this relationship between technology and nature, to not just refer to e-waste but to consider the living aspects of our ecosystem, not just humans, are part of our networks. below are a couple of early renderings i made in midjourney, to begin to visualize the main characters of this story.

this story was not a departure for me as someone who often thinks about how surreal it is that the earth has been home to us for generations, and that those earlier generations didn’t just evaporate but were returned to the earth and have become matter. the layers of earth that we learn about in science classes are also sediment composed of the DNA of our ancestors. we literally walk among them. their burial grounds are where we take refuge.

it led me to realize that if the earth’s crust holds the passages of war and bloodshed, then surely plants must know too. I believe we walk among our ancestors everyday, most likely without regard every time we walk by plants without acknowledgment. feels like the way alice walker asked us to see Black women in The Color Purple.

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.” — alice walker, the color purple

in my story, i wanted to hold the ways that plants are our ancestors living among us, and as artist kandis williams put it in this conversation, and as reflected by her work, that plants are both witness and a ‘victimless’ crime. the natural world has too been part of the legacy of forced migration and western imperialism that now continues as part of digital conquests.

i believe the internet is living through both human and natural intervention (and in foregrounding indigenous and non-western practices the two are not exclusive of each other). i might still write that story but what began to happen as i imagined this world, i started to appreciate the unraveling of language that was needed to serve the story. i need to deconstruct the structure of computers, networks, and systems, and in doing so i became more deeply interested in the ways that language is a portal for how we can begin to refuse our current oppressive systems of technology, science, and mapping, repair through the breaking and reimagining, and lastly, reconnect to ourselves and our ecosystems in their fullness and to enact new realities.

it’s why the “C” of the abc framework and glossary i am building stands for “critical media ecology” — to bring together the concepts of "media ecology and critical ecology. on the one hand, media ecology as defined more formally by neil postman:

"looks into the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; and how our interaction with media facilitates or impedes our chances of survival. The word ecology implies the study of environments: their structure, content, and impact on people. An environment is, after all, a complex message system which imposes on human beings certain ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving.”

basically how humans communicate and how that in turn shapes us as humans and our evolution. on the other hand, i’m building on Dr. Suzanne Pierre, who as a PhD student began connecting settler colonialism, racism, and capitalism to ecology, “the science of the relationships among living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment.” essentially, studying environmental factors could be a way to combat oppressive systems. i am interested in the where these two schools of thought triangulate the relationship between humans, computing (to account for software and hardware), and plants through an anti-colonial Black feminist lens. i think there are other terms from ecology, beyond garden, that we can build into the language of computing and the internet to grow beautiful lushes futures.

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