A look into Anagram’s new sci-fi audio piece about plant communication and the end of our species based on real events.
[Below is a transcript adapted from the launch presentation of Messages to a Post Human Earth, as part of the IDFA DocLab’s do {not} touch: Symbiotic Bodies event in November 2020. Messages to a Post Human Earth is a two-person audio experiment created by the ANAGRAM collective.]
How do you look for things you don’t know are there?
I’m May and I’m here to tell you about a project we’ve been working on at Anagram called Messages to a Post Human Earth, which attempts to answer this question.
Anagram are a female-led creative studio specialising in thought-provoking interactive storytelling via installations, VR or experiences that challenges the way you see the world. We’ve created experiences about being lost, spying on other people and the feeling of your own voice.
But this year — it being, you know, this year, we thought we’d do something about the end of human civilisation.
This is a project that is about the long view. The really long one. The one that takes you out of “the tunnel of now” and backwards to a place that we can’t see most of the time. But occasionally it is tangible in our skin. It reveals the edges of us and our context.
Before we start, if you can get a plant from your room at home and place it near the screen. That might be a good way to start.
The end of the world as we know it
Messages to a Post Human Earth is based on some historical events; but really it’s about you now and what you can feel in the moment and who you can feel it with.
To explain the inspiration for the piece, however, I’ll have to take you back.
The 80s. Big hair was everywhere. Nuclear families, nuclear fission, nuclear fallouts. People were worried.
The production of nuclear power had created nuclear waste. This waste needed to be disposed of, and this caused its own problem: what we had created was so toxic that it would outlive us in its destruction. In fact, neptunium, a by-product of nuclear reactors, is a radioactive particle with a half life of two million years.
In an attempt to warn whoever might come into contact with the waste, the US Government set up a task force — a team of nuclear physicists, scientists, engineers, behaviour researchers to work out how we were going to leave signs on these sites. The sign would of course be a warning, a kind of “REALLY REALLY REALLY DO NOT TOUCH” sign.
But what languages could it be in?
The thing is, it probably wouldn’t be humans that would find these signs. Not a civilisation we would understand anyway. As such, a number of huge monuments were subsequently proposed. A range of menacing concrete jagged thorns pointing around the field of waste — no one could miss that right? Surely history has taught us that monuments do collapse and become ruins. Next.
One such idea that captured our attention came from Stanislaw Lem, a writer known for wild fictions of mental brilliance, such as Solaris, The Futurological Congress and other extraordinarily odd stories.
He proposed that messages could be placed inside the DNA of a plant; and since plants have been here before us and would be here after us, plants could help us warn future living beings to “REALLY REALLY REALLY DO NOT TOUCH” certain piles of toxic waste.
But hang on, what would the plants think of this? Playing carrier pigeons of doom.
Secret messages from plants
Germinating in the margins of familiarity the seeds of truth are anomalous occurrences. Out of context like invasive weeds that do not belong in the well established terrains of cultural consensus. These anomalies become especially troublesome when they gather to the point that they can no longer be ignored. Then they pose a serious threat; that of undermining the confidence of the existing field as their blossoming opens the mind into uncharted realities and extraordinary possibilities.
Dr. Monica Gagliano, Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants, North Atlantic Books, 2018.
To answer this, we collaborated with Dr. Monica Gagliano, an evolutionary ecologist and a professor at the Biological Intelligence Lab in the Southern Cross University in Australia. She is the recent author of Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants, which she calls a “phytobiography”, a collection of stories written in partnership with a plant. If anyone was going to tell us what plants were saying, it would be her.
Dr. Gagliano’s work has made headlines.
In 2015, she discovered that plants had memory and tested it in a lab with a bunch of Mimosa plants (which are highly sensitive). Each one was dropped roughly six inches — but always with a soft, foamy landing. This experience should be “scary” enough to alert the plants to curl their leaves, but as the experiment continued, Dr. Gagliano found that the plants no longer responded in fright, many of which even stopped curling their leaves and, “[b]y the end, they were completely open,” she said when presenting her research to other scientists, “they couldn’t care less anymore.”
As a scientist, Dr. Gagliano is celebrated in many ways; but a fan of science she’s not. There were many answers that science was not going to help her work out.
In one particular experiment she discovered that plants could tell when and what other plants were near them and thus act accordingly. Even when she blocked off all sources of light, of chemical transference, of sound, or any known way we knew that signals could pass from one thing to another, the plants could still work out who their neighbours were. The title (and somehow the conclusion) of her paper was, “Out of Sight but Not out of Mind: Alternative Means of Communication in Plants”.
There’s a mystery here we don’t know yet how to solve. Perhaps a sixth or seventh sense we can’t (yet) read. Her work sparked controversy. In the science community you’re not supposed to conclude that something is a mystery. You’re supposed to prove your thesis — the things you already know to look for.
But how do you look for things you don’t know are there?
Back in 80s Warsaw, Stainslaw Lem was trying to iron out some issues with his plant-based, gene-splicing courier service.
He noticed a few obvious flaws.
What if the people in the future don’t look?
What if they’re not interested?
What if the messages simply pass them by?
How to see a tree
Dr. Gagliano explained the phenomenon of plant blindness to us. People think of plants as the background. They move too slowly and something about how they are stuck in one place has tended to allow us to underestimate them. One could also blame Aristotle for setting out the hierarchy two thousand years ago that has persisted in Western culture: Human, Animal, Plant. They’ve always been at the bottom.
What happens if you turn that on its head and take a plant and look at it in the eyes. Was it possible that the plant you’re looking at has already had messages for us that we hadn’t been bothered to look for?
This is what Dr. Gagliano did next.
Irritated by the scientific communities’ dismissal of plant intelligence — still considered as a bit of an “out there” subject, she began to connect with indigenous communities in Australia. Taking them as her guide for spiritual encounters with plants, she was still looking for the sixth sense that she could not read in the lab but knew had always been there. She has a hunch that the plants are wise and through plant medicine she stepped over the threshold of science to learn a way of finding those messages.
Messages from another time. A kind of deep past.
Something that the indigenous communities understand profoundly. To them, evolution is not only imagined as the Darwin “staircase” of hierarchy; rather, they see it as a bush. Life forms choose different paths to meet particular needs in their various environments. Plants have been on earth for seven-thousand million years — they might know a thing or two about it.
Evolving equals
Darwin did not see evolution as an escalator but as a sinuous branching radiating pattern, not a staircase but perhaps a bush or seaweed. Life- forms diverge from each other to meet particular needs in their various environments. Our own species figures then only as only among the many with no special status or guarantee of supremacy.
Mary Midgley, The Solitary Self: Darwin and the Selfish Gene (Heretics (Acumen)), Routledge, 2010
Now look at the plant that is in front of you.
It got here in many ways like you did. Responding to the things life throws at it. It decided at some point that it would be better to be ground in one place and fan out. Decided to be able to change its shapes with ease. Get long bits when needed to reach for the sun or root to the soil.
You on the other hand didn’t go for just a plasticine form; one that would adapt its shape to its environment. Yours is more of a template — sure you can get fatter or thinner but the form of your species is consistent. You could run to get away from danger to change your position. That was your species’ response to the problems of place.
Which branch of evolution was the better decision?
Wouldn’t you like to know how they would make the case for being more like them?
If the plants could talk what would they argue is their USP?
As a professor in plant communication, Dr. Gagliano knows of course that plants are speaking to each other; but also she wants them to speak to her. Which they do.
We wanted to create an experience where you would feel seen by your photosynthesising companions and your connection to them and theirs to you would be tangible even if for a moment.
This is why we created Messages to a Post Human Earth.
It’s an experience about plant communication. But the details of the science aren’t that important .
Because it’s about feeling, not thinking. We were interested in creating an experience that would override the sensory staleness of many of our day-to-days. Although an expert in her field Monica is clear that thinking about our relationship with plants should not be left to experts. Not only is science a conservative field that moves slowly and often fails to see its own subjectivity, its position as pride of place in our culture that extols — I think therefore I am -rather than I feel therefore I am — has led to a culture where the individual does not trust their own experience or their ability to directly observe and understand the world around them. Despite being firmly within that discipline Monica wants to encourage people to listen to their own senses, sit with that sensation and regain their own knowledge of what it means to be learning from a plant.
Polishing the window
As much as our brains are considered the organ of our intelligence they are also the organ that gates sensation. Sensory gating describes the neurological process of filtering out redundant stimuli in the brain from all possible environmental stimuli. The levels at which each individual limits what inputs they receive is different — what you catch in different environments is unique to you.
Can you always trust what you hear?
If you step into your local park or garden and you can’t hear or see anything special, is it because there is nothing there? This might sound a bit off but let’s consider this example.
Imagine being in a party and you can’t tell what is being said and then someone in the corner of the room says your name. And suddenly you can hear the whole conversation. You can hear every word.
The thing is, you might be able to listen but you can’t always hear.
Messages to a Post Human Earth is an evocative experience that you can do with a friend to begin to polish some of the listening devices you already have in a place not so far from your home, and to cross the threshold into something a bit magical.
Reflecting a historical moment through the lens of contemporary science, think of it as a kind of sci-fi poem that invites you to encounter the natural world as a hearing living thing, as sensorially alert as you, if not more. With lifeforms that may know things that you don’t. Because they’ve really been here a very long time.
Try it for yourself (the experience is available until December 13, 2020) or learn more about it.
Join our mailing list to get updates on the full immersive launch of Messages to a Post Human Earth next year.
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Credits
Messages to a Post Human Earth is a new work by Anagram, commissioned by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute in Poland, in collaboration with IDFA DocLab R&D Program in Amsterdam.
Original concept development by Michael Golembewski. With special thanks to Monica Gagliano, Research Associate Professor in Evolutionary Ecology at the Biological Intelligence (BI) Lab, Southern Cross University.
