Joan Greer, Sourayan Mookerjea, and Tegan Moore 2020 Seed time is composed of memory-storage, dispersal, pyriscence, imbibition, respiration, light, mobilization, sprouting, growth, and regeneration through which negentropic common-being creates a place for Earth-bound lifetimes, giving wisdom, taking care and creating common wealth. Past, present and future non-extractivist seed-communication points towards deep energy transitions to slow futures. The possibility for delinking from the toxic waste economy may be searched for here. [ID: Video of a Milkweed plant focusing on the bursting seed pods, in negative. A poem scrolls across the bottom of the screen like a stock ticker. The title of each poem appears in the centre of the video changing as each poem cycles through.] Text: Memory-storage Protecting, enduring, holding spring in speck, mote, nut and drum through the orbit of our nearness to the soil singing the shrouds of life into tillage and the harvest weight of day-break. Returning difference, possible futures’ pasts. So the forest knows how to be there. Dispersal Whether sailing, afloat, riding, or just passing through hot animal entrails of field and forest, seeds chart our mineral planet into grounds, paths, bournes, quarters, beds, nests, cradles . . . Pyriscence Deep in the swidden earth, seeds are negentropically sparked. “It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state of 'equilibrium' that an organism appears so enigmatic…” (Schrodinger) Flying under the radar of probability, seeds make their move against the arrow of time, always in the nick of time. Flecks of bound energy that creates a heaving sea of grass for all creatures to crawl forth and walk upon the midden of being here. Imbibition Here’s to all our dear friends, so glad to have you over, gathered at this late hour and at last! To health! To the fertile earth! And to our pregnant feasts forever! Respiration The law of the jungle is actually give and take. Breathe in, breathe out. Is how we belong to the common wealth of negentropic seed time. We the living are always together a plenitude, so long as . . . the clouds still gather us in their melt. Take this, plant this, give this. Get this? Mobilization A-statistical metabolic microprocessors pick up and carry the chanting until the dance breaks out. Seeds are molecular media with which the medical soil remembers our stricken sun. So the seed sutras teach us to learn them, find them, collect them, plant them and give them. While the seed plugs together its grid.

Inverse Insulations in a Seed Time Poem Cycle

The nucleic video-poem cycle of seed time probes the slow speeds and infrastructural properties of Earth-bound seeds for political models of : (i) negentropic renewable energy; (ii) regenerative gift and share economies; and (iii) feminist embodied conviality and solidarity. Seed time is composed of memory-storage, dispersal, pyriscence, imbibition, respiration, light, mobilization, sprouting, growth, and regeneration through which negentropic common-being creates a place for Earth-bound lifetimes, giving wisdom, taking care, and creating common wealth. Past, present, and future non-extractivist sympoietically embodied seed-communication points towards deep energy transitions to slow futures. The possibility for delinking bodies from the toxic waste economy may be searched for here.

Joan Greer’s research engages with issues of artistic identity, the history of environmentalism, and theories of nature and ecological envisioning—both historically (most particularly in the long nineteenth century), and in contemporary art and design. Joan teaches at the University of Alberta in the department of History of Art, Design and Visual Culture, is a founding committee member of the Faculty of Arts/ALES Environmental Studies (ES) Programme, and an ongoing member the University of Alberta Religious Studies (RS), and the Science and Technology in Society (STS) Interdisciplinary Programmes. Joan’s current major project is entitled Visualizations of Nature in late nineteenth-century Dutch art and print culture: Religion, Science and Art. Other recent and ongoing research projects include “’To everything there is a season’: the rhythms of the year in Vincent van Gogh’s socio-religious world view”, Van Gogh and the Seasons, ed. Sjraar van Heugten, (exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2017) republished by Princeton University Press, March 2018; “Visualizations of ‘Nature’: Entomology and Ecological Envisioning in the art of Willem Roelofs and Vincent van Gogh” (submitted for publication of proposed essay collection provisionally entitled Eco-critical approaches to 19th century art); “Art in the Anthropocene II: a selection of visual research from the University of Alberta Printmakers”, exhibition for Change for Climate: Art for Change Community series, Edmonton, March 2018.

Sourayan Mookerjea is Associate Professor of theory and cultural studies, and director of the Intermedia Research Studio in the Department of Sociology, where he specializes in decolonizing social theory, critical globalization studies, and intermedia research. His current projects and publications include SSHRC-funded research on The Commons and the Convergence of Crises, an intermedia/decolonizing theory of the commons, and Toxic Media Ecologies: Critical Responses to the Cultural Politics of Planetary Crises. He is co-director of both Feminist Energy Futures: Powershift and Environmental Social Justice as well as iDoc: Intermedia and Documentary; a founding member of RePublicU, a critical university studies collaboration of the Arts and the Anthropocene social justice research creation CoLab at the University of Alberta; and co-editor of Canadian Cultural Studies: A Reader (Duke University Press, 2009).

Tegan Moore is an artist working in sculpture, installation, and video. Her practice is informed by structures and systems that work invisibly in the built environment. Concerns with material properties, consumption, climate, economy, and fragility drive her approach to research and production. She completed a BFA at Emily Carr University in 2008, and an MFA at Western University in 2014. Recent exhibitions include Variations at Zalucky Contemporary, Toronto (2018), The Windsor-Essex Triennial of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Windsor (2017), Homestead at Carl Louie, London (2017), Subtraction Inventories at CSA Space, Vancouver (2016), and Semiopaque at G Gallery, Toronto (2016). Moore has participated in international residencies at Mustarinda in Hyrynsalmi, Finland, and Flaggfabrikken (now Aldea), in Bergen, Norway. In 2018, she was a Researcher in Residence at Tokyo Arts and Space, a division of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. She also works as a Media Technician at the University of Western Ontario, and is part of an art-science collaborative research group on plastic pollution titled Synthetic Collective.

http://www.teganmoore.com/