I like to think of a cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics: Mergings of plant and technology in contemporary art

Kesselring, Rahel

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/129063 Copy

Description

Title

I like to think of a cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics: Mergings of plant and technology in contemporary art

Author(s)

Kesselring, Rahel

Issue Date

2025-04-18

Keyword(s)

• eco media
• site-specific art
• forests
• plant studies
• technonatural
• natureculture
• environmental sensing
• contemporary art
• installation art
• sound art
• art and technology
• augmented ecologies
• ecology

Date of Ingest

2025-09-09T11:37:37-05:00

Abstract

Intertwining what can be seen as environment and technology, contemporary art often has a pioneering role in articulating new paradigms. Interlinking ecocritical claims with techno-utopian imaginations, artworks of this genre conceptualize ecosystems as sentient objects of investigation and as autonomous, agential counterparts to a human audience. This article explores how media imaginaries of environmental connectedness might arise or can be imagined in artistic practices through the entanglement of technology and plants or forest ecosystems. In looking at three different artistic case studies, the article investigates how plant bodies and forest ecosystems as well as technological devices are conceptualized, arranged, and interlinked on a material level and explores the epistemologies and aesthetic traditions that the artworks relate to. Through deploying sensing technologies, imaging techniques, sensors, and recording devices, the three artistic case studies discussed in this article—Perimeter Pfynwald (Marcus Maeder, 2019), Terra0 (Terra0, 2016), and Variants (Pierre Huyghe, 2022)—construct ecosystems as entities, explore logics of cybernetics and computation, and in doing so shape our imaginaries of our more-than-human environment.

Series/Report Name or Number

Media-N, vol. 21, issue 1

Type of Resource

text

Genre of Resource

essay

Language

eng

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21900/j.median.v21i1.1808

Copyright and License Information

• Copyright 2025 Rahel Kesselring
• This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).

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