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,…

  The Meet the Makers programme facilitates meetings and conversations between students, teachers and researchers at UU, and makers – i.e., artists, curators, dramaturges, designers or other creative practitioners and professionals within the wider field of arts and culture. We usually organise a Meet the Makers event every block during the academic year, but sometimes

This year’s Transmission in Motion seminar finds itself inspired by approaches to knowing that zoom in on experimental practices of ‘making’. Making, here, is understood as a form of ‘design by doing’. Such practices of designing a technological device, an artistic concept or a didactic plan embrace unpredictability and contingency by refraining from adhering to…

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…