This episode is all about plants, and the art practices that help us to connect with them.

Millennials are obsessed with house plants, driven in large part by an interest in self-care and wellness. Plants are good for our mental health, and thanks to social media, they’ve become increasingly desirable for their aesthetic.  However, what we tend to forget is that making us feel better, and livening up our urban dwellings is the least they do for us. Plants provide the core basis for life on Earth. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to breathe, and we’d have nothing to eat. Despite how essential they are to our survival, we take them for granted. In this episode, we explore how turning plants into art, can help us to develop a deeper understanding and empathy toward them.

Bio:

Alice Yuan Zhang is a mixed reality artist, designer, and program organizer. Her work bridges the sacredness of natural environments with the speculative power of human-made ones, inviting exploration into interspecies empathy, generative networks, and the illusion of agency. She is the co-organizer of virtual care lab, a current resident artist at CultureHub, and an involved member of NAVEL. Alice studied at the University of California, Berkeley.

Alexander Kaye is an artist born near Detroit Michigan and currently residing in Los Angeles California. His practice began in writing and producing music and has since expanded into sound and visual art. He creates experimental music with modular synthesis, field recordings, audio manipulation, chance/aleatoric techniques, and traditional instrumentation. Often finding creative guidance through random operations, he embraces unknown variables as part of the process that influences all of his work.

Adrienne Adar is a sound artist and photographer based in Los Angeles. She creates interactive work, often incorporating living plants and technology in site-specific installations. Adar animates plants with sound, seeking to activate unexpected connections to the natural environment. Adar received her MFA from NYU/International Center of Photography and studied at the Slade School of Art, London. Her work has been shown in Los Angeles, New York, Wyoming, London, and Seoul, Korea, as well as Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin, China. She is a participating organizer of High Desert Test Sites in Joshua Tree, CA and a member of the Southern California Succulent Society.