In the Transmission in Motion Seminar on plant-based dramaturgy, a talk was organized with Chilean theatre director, playwright and musician Manuela Infante. The talk was moderated by Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink, who asked Infante about the artistic creation process of her work Estado Vegetal (Vegetative State). In this work, Infante explored plant-based logic to formulate several…

In the Transmission in Motion seminar on November 18th, entitled “Plant-based Dramaturgy”, Liesbeth Groot-Nibbelink interviewed Manuela Infante about her performance Estado Vegetal (Vegetative State, CIM/Ae 2017), and the creative process leading up to this theatre piece. Infante uses her theatre practice as a way of thinking through academic ideas based in fields such as speculative…

In a way, it is a miracle that a horticultural business exists, because in a sense you never buy one single plant. Rather, you acquire an ever-expanding, living organism which can easily be multiplied by cutting off a small section and planting that elsewhere – from those small cuttings, an entirely new plant grows. In theory,…

Manuela Infante, theatre director of Estado Vegetal, very matter-of-factly recounts the sequential nature of the production’s rehearsal process in the seminar session on ‘Plant-based Dramaturgy’ (18 Nov 2020). For her, the preparatory process undertaken always begins as “procedural,” or what I would interpret to be a task-based methodology. Crucially, Infante shares that her dramaturgical approach…

In her recent lecture for the TiM seminar series, Manuela Infante quoted plant philosopher Michael Marder with regard to the making of her piece Estado Vegetal (2017): “to recognize a valid ‘other’ in plants is also beginning to recognize that vegetal other within us” (Infante 2020). In order to make sense of the above quote,…

Following a focus on Loud tools, a Horizon of beats as measuring tools, an Infrastructure of theatrical tools and notes on The display as a publishing tool this is the last and final post in a series of short writings focusing on current perspectives and methods for measuring transmissions in motions. These posts are rooted…

On a walk back home from the grocery store where I had just picked up supplies essential to my current lifestyle, I received three notifications. The first was a shared link on Whatsapp by a classmate from Amsterdam about a zoom call that was being conducted by Institution for the Arts and Humanites –Judith Butler in…

In Felicitas Macgilchrist, Heidrun Allert and Anne Bruch social science fiction paper titled Students and society in the 2020s. Three future ‘histories’ of education and technology (2019) the writers propose three divergent possible futures for technology and education. While their three distinct future scenarios are extremely thought-provoking and insightful I will reflect on the speculative…

“But in fact, critical education only attempts to perfect professional education.”  – Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (2004, 106) What is the future for the students of today? The question is flawed from the beginning, of course, because there is not one future for everyone, and who are these ‘students of today’ exactly? Felicitas Macgilchrist,…

Our relationships to those times called the future are fraught with presents. As Felicitas Macgilchrist, Heidrun Allert & Anne Bruch’s paper and presentation on scenario-building for education point out, our futures are entangled with “indeterminate sociotechnical configurations” (Macgilchrist et al. 2020, 76). Yet, their interesting and nuanced exploration of scenario building helps to point out…