a score of the radical imaginary.

fieldwork 

for future ecologies

(re)sponding 

(re)imagining

a series of radical propositions in plant sentience & bioacoustics.

and other magical intra-active phenomena.

as material bodily entanglements.

I am a transdisciplinary artist whose work explores embodied knowledge through immersive, interactive, and multisensory environments.

My research-practice encompasses sound performance, somatic movement, immersive spatial audiovisual installations, and ecological research to investigate how the eco-somatic body interacts with non-human systems, often challenging dominant visual regimes through immersive sensory and spatial experiences.

This website is not a blog but a resonant antidote to our restling with the times we live in and this is my story and 'score' as Diné composer, musician and artist, Raven Chacon would put it.

"signal to noise". drawing on watercolor paper with a sharpie. expanded spaces residency, nea livera, peloponnese, greeece (2024)

Προζύμι (prozímip r o z í m i𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑧í𝑚𝑖) sour-dough euphoria in nea livera, peloponnese, greece.

welcome to my website. 

I am a curious human, educator, writer & woman of worlds. 

I am a researcher, writer & sound artist with a restless, energetic entanglement with the quantum world. 

I garden a lot and speak to plants.      I live close to nature and nature is my church.

I believe in gut-metabolism as a way of living and healing from the inside-out. 

the following pages express how I think, feel, act and work through my artistic practice.

The concept as process in research-creation is spurred, motored by quantum thinking about time, space and matter. As philosophical speculation spurs me on and to the relation of the 'field' itself, it is a becoming for me.  

I am inspired by many writers and thinkers, mentors. There is always a need to find a point of entry where (re)paration becomes possible along the way is to imagine within the realm of the ordinary to a becoming–in a a way that allows us to contine to think; to take responsiblity for ourselves and our histories and to act with integrity in both work and love. 

I am  guided by many Indigenous and Black writers and thinkers who help me understand my whiteness, since to examine whiteness as a source of power is often unquestioned or even unobserved in today's political climate.

(re-wilding, re-worlding)

My art-making spans across different geographic locations and situations, highlighting the crucial contribution that art can make to environmental climate studies, plant sentience, writing, affect, politics, and the attention to processes of world-making.

I am deeply affected by the resonance of things that are happening in atmospheres, rhythms of encounter, the more-than human and scenes that shift the social and conceptual ground, offering a valuable intervention in the current discussions of artistic practice and research...radical practices for radical times through sonic cartographies, post-human digital technology projects and sensory anthropology. 

Coplan, Alison, Katya García-Antón, and Stefanie Hessler, eds. Raven Chacon: A Worm's Eye View From a Bird's Beak. MIT Press, 2024.

I am a feminist-materialist, thanks to my time spent in Melbourne, Australia working on my PhD in Art & Process Philosophy. I am always deeply indebted to Concordia University in Montreal, Canada where I have been mentored and nurtured over the years and to this day, I am still teaching & mentoring many wonderful students in the Studio Arts program.  There are too many people to mention here.  I am to many— a woman of worlds, within worlds.....

Abstract: Entering into a Sonic Intra-active Quantum Relation with Plant Life

https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2024-0012

received February 5, 2024; accepted May 28, 2024

lidar scan of a kiwi plant in nea livera (peloponnese) greece (2024).

In the speculative research of plant bioacoustics, one enters into a sonic intra-active relation, by humans with non-human beings (plant life), activated through acoustic wave signals emitted by plants to create electronic patterns of sounds composed by humans and emitted by machines. 

Plants emit sound waves at relatively low frequencies of 50–120 Hz. Experimenting with patching and modulation by tracking these sonic lines of data can indeed lead to unique sonic experiences that tap into the universe's musicology. 

It is fascinating how we can interact with sounds on such a deep level to create acoustic energy. We are and have always been attached to the universe in a relational processual way. We are all interconnected with plant life vibrating at different internal frequencies. 

This article focuses on a symbiotic relation between humans and plant life as an acoustic shimmering ecology – to communicate a posthuman, symbiotic understanding of vegetal matter as a morphological force that (re)shapes, (re)affirms our sonic intra-relations to the natural world. 

This proposition is molecular and metaphysical, as sound matter is of a qualitative multiplicity in the quantum field of listening. By acknowledging ontologically that cosmopolitics brings into relation different practices, practitioners, and the non-human (they assemble in a field of forces and intensities), I argue that there is no sovereign power under which all modes of existence can be organized, and there is no meta-language through which one can master the diversity of all discursive or material practices; but there are intra-relations in which one can get lost in a quantum field of sonic matter by moving into the cracks of the sensorium and the plant biosphere, which includes Indigenous voices. 

The alterity of plant life is daunting froman eco-feminist materialist position in that relationships are the default state of existence and sonic experiences uncover alternative or additional explanations in a (post)phenomenological world – which is embedded in the stuff of acoustics in the many ways humans hear the world. Thus, to communicate a posthuman, symbiotic understanding of vegetal matter necessitates understanding how sound matter intra-performs through a sonic language – where intra-relations with plant life have complex boundaries for humans. 

As a creative practitioner, how does one define the mutually beneficial engagement in plant communication with creative musical encounters? Entanglement is messy and a becoming with the universe as a philosophical sonic meditation and worlding. This entails expanding on plants as cosmogonic beings, world builders, and we, perhaps, are the byproducts of the lives of our vegetal others.

Keywords: acoustic ecologies, plant bioacoustics, environmental humanities, symbiosis, the biosphere.

"Exploring Art and Innovation"

Juliana España Keller, PhD lives between Montreal, Canada & Alhaurín el Grande (Malaga), Spain.. She lives on the land in Andalucia where she creates/collaborates/entangles with other local artists, academics, and anyone interested in the intersection of art and research under the banner: BAJO EL OLIVO.