Thinking through the milieu - a reading group by soft turns, hosted by Gallery 44, Toronto, 2023-2024.
Do you have photosynthesis envy? Imagine the ability to send messages directly from one finger to the next, bypassing your brain—like a plant's ability to communicate directly with its roots and nearby flora. Thinking through the milieu: decentralizing thinking while spending time with plants is a series of reading groups hosted by Gallery 44 Artist-in-Residence Soft Turns, delving into the more-than-human relationships surrounding us. Selected readings from the fields of philosophy, psychology, plant biology and media theory will engage discourses that consider alternate forms of thinking, like in plants or AI.
Over the course of this series, close readings of Teresa Castro, Thomas Fuchs, James Bridle, Laura Tripaldi, Matteo Pasquinelli, Isabelle Stengers, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Richard Powers, Karen Barad, Kohei Saito and Elvia Wilk paired with material, visualization exercises and discussions will consider recent movements towards “decentralized thinking” as a critique of the "individual" in Western thought and others to acknowledge emergent more-than-human relationships and their agency.
Interested in further readings? View the collective reading list here.
The artists wish to thank the Toronto Arts Council for their generous support.
Session Seven (October 10, 2024): selected excerpts by various authors
Session Six (May 2, 2024): Laura Tripaldi - Parallel Minds Discovering the Intelligence of Materials, 2022. excerpt
Session Five (February 21, 2024): Elvia Wilk - The Word Made Fresh: Mystical Encounter and the New Weird Divine, e-flux Journal, issue 92 (June 2018). text
Session Four (November 29, 2023): James Bridle - Ways of Being, 2022. excerpt
Session Three (October 19, 2023): Robin Wall Kimmerer - Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses, 2003. excerpt
Session Two (August 2, 2023): Isabelle Stengers - Reclaiming Animism, e-flux Journal, issue 36 (July 2012). text
Session One (June 7, 2023): Teresa Castro - The Mediated Plant, e-flux Journal, issue 102 (September 2019). text
