Artist Statement

Hacnum Exhibition. various locations, May 16 – 21

Exploring vegetal thinking, digital gardening and post-human neuroqueer phenomenology through the affordances of expanded photography, artist Alison Bennett considers Australian native flowers as celestial encounters. Slowly rotating 3D point-clouds of floral forms coalesce and dissolve – the authenticity of the image as loosely aligned imprecise points of reference folded into the immersive field of extended reality mediation. Rendered as point-cloud models, foliage structures resonate as vibrant matter, testing the affordances of the digital image as a field of thinking.

Arising out of the heightened sensory perceptions of extended lock-down, this creative investigation began through contemplation of flowering street-trees. Through 262 days of lock-down, residents of Melbourne retreated to the hyper-local, often reinforced by a 5 kilometer travel bubble and a one-hour daily time-limit outdoors. The sublime ephemeral springtime flowers of street-trees were amplified by the extreme sensory and social constraints of social distancing. Drawing us into a suspended moment of slow encounter, we attuned to the contained glowing pulse of plants.

In this project, Bennett engages with ‘vegetal thinking’, a concept of critical plant studies that considers our symbiotic relationship with plants (Gibson 2018). This theoretical context is placed alongside the practice of ‘digital gardening’, of “seeds of thought cultivated in public” (Ness Labs) through slow thinking and organic speculation. Indeed, these domains of the vegetal and digital come together in post-human philosophy (Haraway 2016) and notions of compost and soil, seeking to subvert subject/object dichotomies. Mediated through an autistic queer lens (Yergeau 2018), Bennett’s work sides with the object, creating encounters that collapse the spectral, floral and machinic.
https://alisonbennett.net/2021/10/14/vegetal-digital-2021

• Alison Bennett is based in Melbourne, Australia. My broader practice is situated in ‘expanded photography’ where the boundaries have shifted in the transition to digital media and become diffused into ubiquitous computing. Creative projects have tested the creative and discursive potentials of augmented reality, photogrammetry, 3D scanning, point clouds, virtual reality and webXR as encompassed by the medium and practice of photography. As a neuroqueer new-media artist, I have explored the performance and technology of gender identity and considered the convergence of biological and digital skin as virtual prosthesis. Tertiary qualifications: Creative practice research PhD 2017, Deakin University Motion Lab; Master of Fine Art by research 2009, Monash University; Graduate Diploma (Information Management) 1993 RMIT; Graduate Diploma (Cultural Heritage Management) 1991, University of Canberra; Bachelor of Arts (Visual Arts) 1989, UNSW College of Fine Arts. https://alisonbennett.net