A lot of energy is needed to perceive the world, and Evolution is in favor of energy -efficiency. As a result, the human brain does great work to filter things out. We lose the details of our environment as they become familiar, moving through life in a state of almost automatic, objects and concepts recognizing “clothing, furniture, someone’s wife, the fear of war”, such as Viktor Shklovsky in “Art as technology” – Without really seeing them. In that text of 1917, the Russian critic was famous that the purpose of the art was to restore these things, “to make the stone stony. “More recently, a wave of scientists and artists has acknowledged that the stony should be stony like never before: because we have become used to the destruction of the industrial, this automatic anthropocentric mars has put the world deeper into climate catastrophe. Academic approaches such as“Object -oriented ontology“And”the vegetable turn‘Try to reorient our perception of reality so that nature comes into the picture again.
One limit of this battle has tackled ‘plant blindness’, or the post -industrial tendency to ignore plant life to the point of invisibility. (Where the names, types and use of plants were once well known, she now dissolves in an amorphic green background.) Science/fiction: a non-history of plants (2025) and his corresponding exhibitionHe opened the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris on the Maison Européenne and travel to the photo Arsenal Wein in October, is part of this wider push to make the botanical too recent.
Written by Felix Hoffmann, Simon Baker, Giovanni Aloi, Nattumi Tanaka and Michael Marder and edited by Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Victoria Aresheva and Clothilde Morette, Science/Fiction Weighs an eclectic photographic history of plants from the present and move non-chronologically between works such as Anna Atkins ‘Asplenium angustifolium’ of its iconic cyanotypes of ferns from the 1850s and Stan Brakhage’s film ‘Garden of Earthly Delightoids’. It not only requires the boundaries between people and nature, but also tries to break down the dividing line between art and science, which gives the same weight to Laure Albin-Guillot’s 1930s Breakthroughs in photomicrography (that Albin-Guillot himself labeled as “decorative”) and contemporary pieces by Sam FallsThis indexic impressions of plants on canvas and ceramic composes and records. As an object, the book connects these inaugurated pieces well and explains the unexpected visual relationship between work from different contexts.
Like many attempts to reconsider the art -historical canon nowadays, Science/Fiction uses a thematic structure. A downfall of this non-historical method is that it sometimes exaggerates the novelty of plants as an important force in Science Fiction; The murderer is a plant subgenre At least as old as Anna AtkinsAnd certainly overlooked more. Similarly, it emphasizes the 19th-century amateur botanie rage that catalys the work of Atkins. Aristocratic scientists inventors such as William Henry Fox Talbot developed new visual tools (such as photography!) Also to catalog their ever-increasing colonial wunder rooms, indirectly leading to the technologies that make our modern ways of seeing possible. The European lust from that century to exotic plants is perhaps the opposite of today’s plant blindness, and it has a lively tradition of birth of Gothic plant sci-fi That also faded the boundaries between man and vegetable to creepy effect. Far from passive wall flowers, these imagined plants were agents of often frightening, all-consuming will, swallowing botanics and protecting their native countries.
At the same time, by turning off chronology and disciplinary frameworks, Science/Fiction Embraces Fiction’s ability to understand the incomprehensible. How do you set your way through catastrophe differently? Instead of conquesting facts or a collection of copies, the book builds a botanical daydream. This is not a bad thing – when it comes to the survival of the anthropocene, we need a little more imagination, and dreams can be urgent work.
Science/fiction: a non-history of plants (2025), written by Felix Hoffmann, Simon Baker, Giovanni Aloi, Nattsumi Tanaka and Michael Marder; Published by Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Victoria Aresheva, and Clothilde Morette; And published by Spector Books is available for pre-order online. The book is available for purchase on April 29.
