Phytovision facilitates phytocentric experiences, reworking digital video for plant perception. On a standard screen, a digital image is constructed from 3 primary colors — red, green and blue — designed specifically for human eyes with these three cones. Most plants perceive light in the spectrum of red and blue. Plants also perceive gravity, and electric fields, and water content of soil and air, and touch, and sound, and a host of chemical interactions, airborne or passing through the soil. For Space p11, video portraits of old growth white pine, hemlock, fern and forest flowers are filtered for the light spectrum of plant perception, and slowed to plant time, while airborne molecules are released into the air as olfactory communication. Phytovision, as both a practice of perception and a plant-oriented media, begins as an experiment to destabilize the primacy of human vision, and quietly opens a number of modes of perception beyond the clear distinctions of our human senses.

Lindsey french is an artist and educator whose work engages in gestures of sensual and mediated communication with landscapes and the nonhuman. She has shared her work in places such as the Museum of Contemporary Art and the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago, the Taubman College Gallery at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and in conjunction with the International Symposium of Electronics Arts in Albuquerque and Vancouver. She currently teaches as Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Studio Arts at the University of Pittsburgh.

Also

An Opening Reception will be held for Phytovision
Friday December 14
5pm

French will host Movie Night for House Plants and their Humans, a reception for area residents who wish to bring their houseplants to enjoy water, grow lights, and films made just for them
Friday December 7
6–7pm

French discusses her exhibition and her work on plant perception, and reads from “Land of Words”, a selection of poetry by plants that she edited for the journal Forty-Five.
Friday December 14
Lunch Hour, 1215–150pm