::fibreculture:: Dark Botany + The Herbarium Tales

[Gary Hall]

We're delighted to announce the publication from Open Humanities Press
of///Dark Botany: The Herbarium Tales/
<http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/dark-botany/>, edited
by Prudence Gibson, Sigi Jottkandt, Marie Sierra and Anna Westbrook.

Available in open access and print:
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/dark-botany/

/Dark Botany/ activates the material and sensorial wonder of
plants—their energy, their mysterious allure, their capacities and
skills, their independent might. In this /Wunderkammer/ of critical
plant studies essays and plant+artworks, the herbarium emerges as a site
of multiple materialities and reflexive forms of counter-narrative.
Herbaria specimens come alive as assemblages, telling truths about their
dark histories and darker contemporary currents, while reflecting on the
complexity of texture, movement, memory, compound structure, chemical
emissions and rapid evolution of plants and languages. What one
discovers is that herbaria are not static: they are as vital, energetic
and enigmatic as the plants in their collections—and as diverse.

With contributions by Giovanni Aloi, Matthew Beach, Tamryn Bennett,
Edward Colless, Prudence Gibson, Ryan Gordon, Lisa Gorton, Sigi
Jöttkandt, Nick Koenig, Verena Kuni, Anna M. Lawrence, Vanessa Lemm,
Rebecca Mayo, Aunty Deirdre Martin, Arina Melkozernova, Elaine Miller,
Jacob Morris, Anna Perdibon, Anna Madeleine Raupach, Georgina Reid,
Heather Rogers, Betty Russ, Erica Seccombe, Marie Sierra, Christina
Stadlbauer, Anna-Sophie Springer, Bart Vandeput, Juliann Vitullo, Anna
Westbrook and Maya Martin-Westheimer.

/Dark Botany: The Herbarium Tales/ is an Open Humanities Press Labs
Seedbook <http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/labs/seedbooks/>:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/labs/seedbooks/

It is also part of The Herbarium Tales <http://theherbariumtales.org>.

---

The Herbarium Tales

http://theherbariumtales.org/

This is a plant studies Australian Research Council Linkage project
2020-23. It is a collaboration between University of NSW, Bundanon Trust
and the Sydney Botanic Gardens Herbarium. The interdisciplinary team
includes Prudence Gibson UNSW, Sigi Jottkandt UNSW and Open Humanities
Press, Sophie O’Brien Bundanon Trust, Marie Sierra Melbourne University
and Brett Summerell Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney.

The project outputs will include three films, two major outdoor
artworks, a living book, a city forest, a monograph called The Herbarium
and Me and this network of people and plants. Our team is dedicated to
redefining the ways plants are understood and valued, and also to
deepening recognition and understanding of the ways plants are important
actors in political, economic and social relations.

We hope to celebrate and interrogate the agency, in/inter-dependence,
and performing subjectivities of plants; we also hope to develop
critical understandings of plants as performing actors in
bio/phyto-political relations. Lead CI of this project, Prudence Gibson,
has written a book entitled The Plant Contract (Brill 2018), which
charts a new deal for the vegetal world that centres on an aesthetic of
care, via a promise between one person and one plant to take care. This
project aims to enact such a philosophy.

--
Gary Hall
Professor of Media
Director of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University:
https://postdigitalcultures.org/about/

Website:http://www.garyhall.info
Follow on Mastodon here: @garyhall at hcommons.social

Latest:

Blog posts: 'A Brief History of Writing: From Human Meaning to Pattern Recognition and Beyond', with Joanna Zylinska, The Writing Platform:https://thewritingplatform.com/2024/05/a-brief-history-of-writing-from-human-meaning-to-computational-pattern-recognition-and-beyond/

'Creative AI: Thinking Outside the Black Box', Media Theory:https://mediatheoryjournal.org/2024/05/24/gary-hall-creative-ai-thinking-outside-the-black-box/

'Oxford and the Observer Do Social Mobility',http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/2024/6/10/oxford-and-the-observer-do-social-mobility.html

















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