I’ve been interested in rethinking the relationship between humans and nonhumans, in order to move away from an anthropocentric perspective.
In my research, I encountered the concept of “intra-action,” coined by Karen Barad within the discussions of New Materialism. Unlike “interaction,” which assumes separate entities, “intra-action” suggests that things come into being through their relations. This helped me think differently about how agency is formed — not as something owned by individuals, but as something that emerges between them.
This led me to draw a connection to the structure of the blues call and response. In blues, the exchange — the improvisation — becomes a space where voices emerge in relation to one another. I saw a parallel between this and the idea of emerging agencies in intra-action. There’s also a emotional resonance: the sorrow embedded in blues echoes the overlooked histories of nonhumans.
I chose plants as my nonhuman collaborators because there could be metaphorical and historical links between the transcontinental trade of plants and the slave trade, which is connected to the origins of blues.
For the methodology, I used computing. I used an Arduino to capture electronic signals from the plants and Max/MSP to build a system that enables me to jam with a plant. The key element is sound. The plant's response sound shouldn’t be so different that it seems like it's playing alone and not responding, but also not so similar that we can't perceive the plant’s modifying agency.
To achieve this, the first thing I tried was using the nn~ object, a pre-trained sound model that works like a vocoder. The second thing I explored was using the switch object, which sends data at regular intervals to change the sound.