From Avatar to Lord of the Rings, plants are no strangers to playing big movie roles, but no one’s ever shot a film the plants themselves can watch. Until now.
In a New York art gallery, seven house plants have spent the last seven weeks watching Strange Skies, Travel Documentaries for Plants probably the first travel documentary for a vegetable audience.
The movie by conceptual artist Jonathon Keats consists of idyllic Italian skies recorded over a two-month period and condensed into a six-minute dawn-to-dawn span.
PHOTO: AFP
Sitting attentively in cinema-like rows — a majesty palm partially blocking the view of rubber plants behind — the potted audience basks in an electric version of Italian sunshine.
Keats — who previously used footage of bees pollinating flowers to make pornography for plants — said an aspiring filmmaker couldn’t compete with the likes of Avatar director James Cameron.
“But then I realized there’s a much larger audience — there are many more plants than people — that were not being serviced,” he said. “I wanted basically to provide plants with what companies such as Disney or MGM provide humans.”
In the film, projected onto a fluttering white cloth, clear dawn gives way to high cirrus, the occasional airplane trail, a fleeting cameo fly-by of a bird, then dusk.
At night, beams from a romantic quarter moon hit the trunk of one of the ficus trees.
The movie has no sound and the plants, of course, do not applaud.
Other than an alarming loss of leaves among the ficuses there is no discernible reaction.
However, Stephen Squibb, a fellow at the AC Institute, which hosted the installation in a Chelsea gallery, said these viewers were unusually riveted: photosynthesis, or the process of turning light into energy, means the movie keeps them alive.
“This is how they eat,” Squibb said.
The New York natives even get a taste of Italy.
“They’re literally changing their diet,” he said.
Keats sees lessons for visiting humans, who can survey the scene from two minimalist white benches.
“Clearly this is an imperfect representation of place and that’s for me part of what the work deals with. How do we experience the world and how reliable is it?” he asked. “So much of the world we get on screens. By watching the plants watching the sky, there’s something a bit sad and sordid.”
One visitor, artist Rob Tarbell, enjoyed seeing plants center stage.
“It’s good to see a respectful inclusion of something live, capitalizing on what they benefit from rather than having any aspect of cruelty or a freak show,” Tarbell said.
Another visitor, photographer Abbas Ebrahimi, also expressed admiration for the green audience.
“Plants are better than us. We die and go, while in spring they come back each time,” he said.
But after contemplating the installation for a few minutes, he declared: “It doesn’t mean anything to me at all. It’s just trees and light.”
“For some people it might mean something. Maybe if they smoke grass,” he said.
Keats, currently doing a residency at upstate New York’s Yaddo artist colony, is intent on furthering his exploration of plant sensibilities. He plans a “restaurant for plants” at a California museum.
Before that, he’s turning to another overlooked population — bacteria.
He hopes to create educational textbooks teaching general relativity and quantum mechanics to the microorganisms in “easy-to-digest doses of amino acid and glucose.”
“I figure these books should be beneficial to both microbes and humans: By providing bacteria with a good education, we’ll be able to improve their quality of life, and to discourage them from becoming pathogens,” he said.
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
UNCERTAIN TOLLS: Images on social media showed small protests that escalated, with reports of police shooting live rounds as polling stations were targeted Tanzania yesterday was on lockdown with a communications blackout, a day after elections turned into violent chaos with unconfirmed reports of many dead. Tanzanian President Samia Suluhu Hassan had sought to solidify her position and silence criticism within her party in the virtually uncontested polls, with the main challengers either jailed or disqualified. In the run-up, rights groups condemned a “wave of terror” in the east African nation, which has seen a string of high-profile abductions that ramped up in the final days. A heavy security presence on Wednesday failed to deter hundreds protesting in economic hub Dar es Salaam and elsewhere, some
Flooding in Vietnam has killed at least 10 people this week as the water level of a major river near tourist landmarks reached a 60-year high, authorities said yesterday. Vietnam’s coastal provinces, home to UNESCO world heritage site Hoi An ancient town, have been pummeled by heavy rain since the weekend, with a record of up to 1.7m falling over 24 hours. At least 10 people have been killed, while eight others are missing, the Vietnamese Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment said. More than 128,000 houses in five central provinces have been inundated, with water 3m deep in some areas. People waded through
RSS