Digital Gardening at the Wrong biennale

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First weekend of November we gathered at ssesi.space (safe space for exploring stupid/serious/scientific/spiritual ideas and ideologies) in Brno, Czech Republic to launch the opening of Digital Gardening. I was acting as a curator.

Digital Gardening (DG) is speculative set of concepts, actions, and relationships that constitute focal point of artistic research and practice. We aim to explore notions of gardening in connection to notions of digital in their extended sense. Doing that, we observe its local connotations and frictions that arise when related to global or other-local.


When considering gardening we explore:
– human / nonhuman relationships including care-taking, attachment, emotions, possession and future-planning
– set of physical actions, its monotonous and laborious nature and possible creative deviations from or into the routine
– gardening as social institution and social performance
– food production and modes it relates to hegemonic mass production
– body production as physical growth of plants and physical growth of human by action of plants’ consumption
– plant ethics through anthropocentric prism

When considering digital we explore:
– human / nonhuman relationships including outsourcing care taking, dis-attachement, automation and future planning
– set of physical actions – ways of quantifying, planning, analysing and controling them
– digital exploitation of gardening and its implications
– food production and its automatised, technology-augmented and quantified nature
– body production, body augmentation and body alteration by means of bio-engineering effecting plants directly and humans indirectly
– plant ethics through prism of non-human agents and artificial intelligence

Digital Gardening as an event is physically bond to nature-reclaimed, overgrown community garden in Brno-Jundrov, Czech Republic. This physical space is conceived as ssesi.space. The abbreviation stands for safe space for exploring stupid/serious/scientific/spiritual ideas and ideologies. ssesi.space is perceived as temporary autonomous zone (TAS), concept brought forward by anarchist/poet Hakim Bey. Digital gardening and ssesi.space are part of the wrong – biennale of new digital art. The biennale takes place online in pavilions (www.ssessi.space), offline in embassies ssesi.space and on local networks hosted on routers. It runs from November 2019 till March 2020. The opening of ssesi.space and DG-related events is aimed at first and second week of November.