Plant-Human Quarterly

Talking & Listening to Plants

ABOUT THE MAGAZINE

The Plant-Human Quarterly is one face of a multifaceted collaboration between artists and scientists. The entirety of The Plant-Human Communication Project envisions an interdisciplinary, interspecies conversation between the human and botanical worlds and between various modes of thought – scientific, artistic, technological, and more – that help us approach what we perceive as other, in this case the world of plants.

The literary magazine, Plant-Human Quarterly, explores the myriad ways writers make manifest their relationship to the botanical world – from heavily researched pieces, to keen observation, to less systematic, intuitive ways of knowing and interacting – that attempt to communicate across boundaries and possibly approach a plant’s-eye-view of the world.

Another part of the project – THE PLANT IS PRESENT – features interactive installations that ferry people from the human world to the lesser known shores of plants, accessing plants’ electrical signals via EEGs, headsets, and computer-generated sounds, for human ears. The BPI does not approach the scientific signal of electrical potentials as ends in and of themselves, but as the basis for artwork – from music and visual art to dance installations – that imaginatively relays the plants’ own expression and builds a felt relationship between species.

The whole of The Plant-Human Communication Project hopes to transport people across this seemingly unbridgeable divide from the sentience of plants to humans. We also hope this experience encourages our audience to create their own responses – whether through words, music, dance, visual art, or mixed forms – to the botanical world. You can upload your resulting creations here at the Plant-Human Open Mic.

The Project Team – whose collective experience spans the range of evolutionary biology, neuroscience, behavioral science, strategic communication, industrial design, computer technology, dance, music, and literature – seeks to enrich our understanding of how we, as a human species, can live sustainably with the natural world and with each other on this planet. We seek as well to demonstrate how science and technology need not be incompatible with artistic, emotional, and intuitive ways of knowing, but instead, be active collaborators in one larger purpose of interspecies communication. No method is more simplistic than the other, but together they are simply more. 

For submissions information, click here.