This article explores the underlying ideas and aims of Carbon_Dating, in particular plant blindness and multispecies encounters. It also follows shifts in direction guided by First Nations collaborators who assisted in the development of guiding principles for decolonising this creative practice.
Australian artist, Keith Armstrong develops projects in collaboration with diverse communities, by inventing supportive strategies that operate on multiple scales. Carbon_Dating is the latest example of the collaborative projects that he leads, and is a multifaceted, experiential, highly visual, textured and durational artwork/experience. Carbon_Dating embraces the challenges of inventing socio-ecologically engaged practices that are connected to place, and reliant on community partnerships that exist at particular points in time. Creative experimentation and open-ended inquiry therefore lie at the heart of these works, which highlight the value of working in responsive ways to the specifics of real places, real plants and real people.
Like many contemporary artists, Keith situates his work within the socio-ecological realm, in ways that raise interesting questions about the non-traditional role of the artist as environmental campaigner, advocate and change maker. In this case, the work is shaped by a concern with the disappearance of grassland habitats and the eradication of native grasses since colonisation of the Australian continent. However, Carbon_Dating is less didactic than direct activism, instead inviting participants and audiences into relational contact zones, where new worlds can perhaps be better cultivated and imagined.
An open-ended arts-science creative journey
From the outset, Carbon_Dating involved a search for fresh, foundational insights into plant-human interactions, that could transcend single disciplinary viewpoints, whilst also registering those complex interconnections in ways that might be tangible and communicable to audiences. Working in a creative process spread across five years, the first year (2019-20) involved a close engagement with scientists - plant biologists and breath scientists - in a ‘creative incubator’ process that cross-fertilised Ecological Science, Human Physiology Science, Environmental Philosophy & Media Arts. Keith remembers:
I became particularly interested in native grasses through the ongoing mentorship of Professor Jenn Firn, who is, amongst other things, a grasslands regeneration expert. I also re-engaged with staff and researchers at Samford Ecological Research facility, as part of my aim of specifically looking to understand how they measured the life-giving Carbon Dioxide/CO2 ‘inhalations’ & Oxygen/O2 'exhalations' of native vegetation using ‘eddy covariance’ methods. To understand this process better I engaged with members from Prof. Peter Grace's ‘Managing for Resilient Landscapes’ field-work team to understand the form, ‘nature’ & nuances of native vegetation's CO2 'inhalations' & O2 'exhalations'. As part of that initial incubator process I also re-connected with the team from an earlier project I'd run with Human Movement Scientists (called Transaction). This led me to meet with Prof. Kerr & Prof. Stewart (Human Movement/Breath Physiology Science researchers) who have equipment and the know-how to measure O2-C02 exchanges of patients walking or running on a treadmill.
These experiments led towards the project’s initial aim: to uncover the scientific & poetic connections between the ‘lungs of the earth’ & our own breath physiology, in ways that might best activate participants’ minds, bodies & emotions, & promote their reflection, care & ‘reverence’. Reflecting on these aims, Keith Armstrong notes:
Given that human & plant 'breathing' are profoundly linked, and given today's era of rapidly rising C02, these conversations clarified for me the need to urgently imagine creative new ways to enhance public understanding & care for this radical codependency.
These aims were consistent with Armstrong’s long standing commitment to, and skills in facilitating transdisciplinary dialogue and engagement, foregrounded by his creative practices that have continually gone beyond disciplinary constraints in order to engage with complexity. He also rarely works alone, and so in 2021 he built a powerful new creative team with plant based experimental artist Donna Davis, socially engaged practitioner Danielle Constance, writer/researcher Tania Leimbach and photographer and gallery network building expert Andrea Higgins.
Confronting plant-blindness
The orientation of Carbon_Dating is exploratory, poetic, informed by rigorous science and fundamentally driven by an ethical imperative. In its early development, the team resolved that Carbon_Dating should serve to engage with the concept of ‘plant blindness’- a name coined over 20 years ago by Wandersee and Schussler (1999, 2001). Wandersee and Schussler noted that despite the fact that plants make up approximately 80% of all biomass on Earth, and have critical roles in almost all ecosystems through their provision of shelter, oxygen and food, many people ignore them or at least devalue their importance with respect to other animals and human beings. This way of seeing plants as inanimate background material runs deep within Western culture. Armstrong decided to focus specifically on the disregard for native grasses within mainstream Australia since colonisation:
My interest in grasses was further increased by their apparent extreme invisibility for many, beyond lawn or pasture - as I began to understand that native species had become absent from much of the landscape in Australia due to introduced and highly invasive pasture grasses.
This apparent widespread indifference to plants - specifically native grasses - despite their life-giving force is something that the project set out to radically challenge. Such a commitment to reshaping Western cultural values is similarly shared by multispecies scholars working in the environmental humanities and cultural geographies, who are motivated to de-centre the human through their scholarship. In decentring the human, and seeking to understand multiple nonhuman standpoints, multispecies studies have produced rich descriptions of different worlds that can transcend conventional disciplines, not only in epistemologies and ontologies, but also via ethical and affective dimensions. They achieve this by using modes of representation that call upon us all to engage in different ways with the nonhuman that are affective and ethical. For a recent example of public storytelling that demonstrates this kind of wide-ranging scholarship and collaboration, see The Feral Atlas and The Urban Field Naturalist Project.
Akin to Armstrong (and his collaborators) practice, the notions of care and empathy drive much of the research around human-nonhuman relations, in ways that often transcend the confines of discipline-based writing and thinking. For example Multispecies Studies seek to subvert hierarchies built around anthropocentrism, firstly by (reflexively) acknowledging anthropocentrism in current research and in our day-to-day world, and then secondly by working to develop theory and methods that decentre the human and develop a different (ethically and politically pointed) description of relations in the world. In this work, agency and care inform how encounters with the nonhuman are understood. Human agency - the capacity to think, to decide, to make and to act - is the distinct capacity to make a particular kind of difference; one which does not privilege us ontologically, but which nonetheless places an onus on the human as a distinct kind of agent/actor within socio-ecological networks. This ‘onus’ can be seen in Fredrik Karlsson’s (2011: 270) suggestion that the encounter with nonhumans is ‘the basic, moral event’, and one which may expose asymmetries of power that require ‘an increased responsibility’ of humans in their actions towards nonhumans.
Making care for Country foundational
Notions of multispecies encounter are also implicit within Australian Indigenous practices of Caring for Country. This is because mutual responsibility and reciprocity are alive in the broader cosmo-ecological frameworks of Indigenous traditional knowledge systems, which are so fundamentally different to Western extractive colonialism. Through the development of Carbon_Dating, it became profoundly important for the creative team to reflexively question their approach, and from the beginning they sought to refine and deepen their capacity to work in respectful ways on, and with Country. These approaches evolved through robust dialogue with Indigenous community leaders. As Armstrong highlights:
In October 2021, the project team held a seminal consultation session with Freja Carmichael, a Ngugi woman, weaver and curator belonging to the Quandamooka People of Moreton Bay with the intention of both gathering some feedback on project progress and also to receiving counsel on how to orientate our work in ways consistent with First Nations principles of Care for Country. Freja challenged us strongly to think more closely about the community dimensions of the work and each site, suggesting that we might wish to work more actively to build community both locally and at each location in which we were working, or intended to work.
She encouraged us to actively reach out to key First Nations people both locally and around Qld - to ensure that the networks of communications between what we were by then calling our ‘grassland carers’ would be strengthened. Her instinct was to defocus the somewhat scientistic approaches that we had pursued to that date, to instead consider the land we were working with to be sentient, and the grasses to be very much part of that whole living ecology. This also connected our thinking back to principles of cultural burning, whose purpose actively includes encouraging the growth and renewal of grasses as a central part of a healthy landscape.
Freya Carmichael’s generous guidance helped the project team in their creative orientation and encouraged their shared commitment to explore ways of working that might contribute (in albeit modest ways) to reverse the pattern of colonial exploitation of the environment in Queensland. These new understandings were channeled into the project, and were reflected in shifts towards the creation of a subsequent multi-site, multi-focal, networked approach, guided by the following fundamental principles:
This set of working principles helped Carbon_Dating’s collaborative team to reimagine the network of sites for Carbon_Dating as an evolving, supportive ‘community of care for native grasses and grasslands’. The team resolved that each site should therefore be led by or guided by Indigenous carers or consultants so that the process could become more aligned with First Nations ways of knowing.
Creative strategies of Carbon_Dating
The project began to take shape around these principles in 2022, developing through a range of collaborative actions that initiated and supported a network of participants and provocateurs, each committed to encouraging rituals of care with local native grasses, and the broader aim of supporting the restoration of grassland ecologies.
Site-specific grass plantings were also undertaken across the state of Queensland from September 2022 onward, supported by the involvement of five local art galleries and cultural spaces. The engagement with regional cultural organisations demonstrated their potential to collaborate in socio-ecological agendas that facilitate ‘new forms of sociability and environmental interaction’ and to ‘explore appropriate forms of activism in their work’ (Leimbach 2015). In this sense, Carbon-Dating models a modality for aesthetics to become actively situated in the world, rather than existing in a separate or elevated field that would be seen as diminished if brought into contact with the stuff of real-life.
The final community of carers and sites on Country follows:
Along with native grass planting events, the ‘grassland community of care’ that emerged from the sum of these sites, was aided by the creation of the ‘Interweaver’ - a technological/sculptural tool and object-artwork - developed by Donna Davis, and a set of daily provocation cards that participants could read and choose to write on, developed by Daniele Constance - the project’s ‘Grassland Community of Care Coordinator’.. All of these items were designed to further facilitate eco-social connections between participants and local grasses, and also to encourage interactions between each site within the project's network.
The Interweaver took shape iteratively between 2021-22, ultimately becoming a desktop-sized hybrid sculpture/assemblage, encompassing a wooden base, glass dome, grass imagery, grass seed, a magnifying glass, a series of numbered prompt cards and a kaleidoscopic video screen - showing daily timelapse images of grass growing at the project’s Samford site, and with an accompanying soundtrack automatically generated from environmental data at the growing site. The Interweaver thus manifested as a novel combination of sculptural object, scientific implement (eg magnifying glass, dishes etc), living grass seed, and digital content.
The project team then physically visited each site to help set up the grass mound with the local carers, and to install the individual Interweaver, normally close to where the grass mound was planted - which was either in the carers’ places of residence or work or in one case in their local gallery. From that point on, the carers were left mostly to their own devices to work with the planted grasses, the Interweaver, and the prompt cards as they saw fit for three months. The Grassland Community of Care Coordinator Danielle also touched base with each carer and supported them as needed periodically.
These interactions, facilitated through the project design between the Interweaver and participants, thread back to the original ambition of Carbon_Dating - to create ‘live, mediated experiences that sensitise participants to each other’s presence & environmental influence, without them necessarily being able to see, hear or speak to each other’. The project team was drawn to creating work that encourages attention beyond the human realm towards other less familiar species and forms, both visible or invisible. To work in this way is grounded on the principle that one's affect within an ecology is complex, multidimensional and only partly knowable. The process seeks to encourage acts of humility, care and future sustenance, that correspondingly help participants to make greater sense of their own unspoken roles and responsibilities within an socio-ecological system. As Armstrong states:
It’s not unusual to speak of our love for “Nature”. But what does that really mean, & how do we actually express it? The health-science of ‘Forest Bathing’/Shin-rin Yoku, initiated in Japan, has found global popularity by demonstrating how exposure to the plant realm has significant health benefits, invigorating immersants in breath-like photosynthesis processes. Given today’s excess of atmospheric Carbon Dioxide, the crucial ongoing work of Australia's forests, grasslands & pastures literally keeps us alive. And yet, despite this extraordinary capacity few of us arguably understand or viscerally appreciate this invisible process.
Conclusions
Through playfulness, humour & performance Carbon_Dating seeks to do the ‘serious’ work required to re-imagine & re-envision human-ecological co-dependence. Artists are well placed to broker ambiguous, playful experiments such as these, with rigorous science framed as ally & equal. Art-Science luminary Jill Scott asserts that 'creative incubators' built upon shared issues of concern, create particularly powerful opportunities for ideas & skills exchanges, building trust whilst ensuring access to high-end scientific resources to support such deeply collaborative journeys. In the case of Carbon_Dating the creative incubation has been long and fruitful and the project continues to evolve towards a traveling exhibition in 2024-6, with multiple, ongoing opportunities for plant-human connection along the way.
References
Karlsson, F. 2011, 'Care-ethics and the moving animal: The roles of love and sympathy in encountering the animal being' in J. Bull (ed) Animal Movements - Moving Animals: Essays on Direction, Velocity and Agency in Humanimal Encounters, Centre for Gender Research, University of Uppsala, pp. 269-283. <http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:420252/FULLTEXT01.pdf>
Leimbach, T. 2015, Sustainability and the Material Imagination in Australian Cultural Organisations, PhD Thesis, University of Technology Sydney.
Tsing, A. (Ed.) 2021, Feral Atlas, Digital Platform, Stanford University Press, ISBN 9781503615045, DOI 10.21627/2020fa
Wandersee, J. H., and Schussler, E. E. (1999). Preventing plant blindness. Am. Biol. Teach. 61, 82–86. doi: 10.2307/4450624
Carbon_Dating is an experimental artwork designed to seed ‘consensual’ partnerships between Australian native grasses and humans, based upon their shared need to breathe each other’s ‘exhaled’ air.
We acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the many lands on which we live, work and create, including our collaborators on Yirrganydji, Barunggam, Jagera/Yuggera, Turbal, Ugarapul, Jinibara, Kabi Kabi and Kombumerri Country. We acknowledge their ongoing connection and custodianship for Country. We pay our deep respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. We recognise First Nations people as the first artists and scientists. Always was, always will be.
The 2024-5 Carbon_Dating exhibition tour is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts QueenslandAssisted by QUT School of Creative Practice, International Art Services (IAS), Native Seeds Pty Ltd, Artfully, and Embodied Media.
Between 2019-23 this project was assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. It was also supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, Regional Arts Development Fund (RADF). The Regional Arts Development Fund is a partnership between the Queensland Government: Cairns Regional Council; Western Downs Regional Council; City of Gold Coast Council; Somerset Regional Council; and ArtsCoast as part of Sunshine Coast Council’s RADF program to support local arts and culture in regional Queensland.
Thanks also to QUT (School of Creative Practice, QUT Office of eResearch and Samford Ecological Research Facility). NorthSite Contemporary Arts, Cairns; Dogwood Crossing Gallery, Miles; HOTA, Gold Coast; The Condensery, Toogooloowah; Caloundra Regional Gallery, Caloundra; Native Seeds Pty Ltd and ReBul Packaging.
