Redefining Human: Multisensory Expansion & Augmentation towards Phytomorphic Perception

Humankind has demonstrated an accelerating openness to relationships with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotic human substitutes that stretches back to Joseph Weisembaum’s natural language processing software ELIZA of the mid 1960s.

Prior to this, philosophical arguments for the Computational Theory of Mind (CTM) established the view of human minds and thought as being similar to the processing and logic seen in computers and computation.

Though CTM does not fully explain our openness to digital non-humans, my arts based research considers alternative manifestations of our capacity to entertain other models of thought and perception, primarily Phytomorphic (plant based) views, and how these perspectives might affect both our ontological understanding of self and our relationship with other entities.

This research is largely informed by a philosophically posthuman perspective, drawing primarily on the work of object-oriented ontologist Timothy Morton as well as other more interconnected or symbiotic models of posthuman thought. Lynn Marguilis’ idea of the Holobiont – an organism and its internal and external microorganisms as a singular ecological unit – frames my understanding of the individual and the environment as an interconnected and inseparable system.
These ideas are considered in relation to theories of embodied architecture pioneered by Gins and Arakawa and Juhani Pallasmaa that provide a multisensory framework, which aims to move away from ocular-centrism.
The work of blind artist and theorist Thomas Tajo adds contemporary perspectives to human multisensory potential. A skilled echolocator, Tajo suggests that our ancestors originally had parity of the senses, which was disrupted by our use of fire that led to vision becoming humankind’s primary sense. The proliferation of screen based media and internet technology can be seen as another disruption, further flattening human perception to a digital visual medium.
The potential for broadening our sensory modalities is seen as a tool to imagine the diversity of perceptual systems that exist beyond the human.
The enduring contradiction of posthuman philosophy is our inability to truly imagine an umwelt beyond our own. We will only ever know what it is to be human.

My research suggests that what we consider “human” could be seen as an incomplete version of ourselves that has been influenced by CTM. A projection of the dominant technological medium on our own minds, ascribing logic and limitations that are not real. Examples of expanded human sensory modalities help guide our understanding and openness towards more-than-human perception that can be imagined through arts based research. Ultimately, Phytomorphic perspectives (or even a Phytomorphic Theory of Mind) could be seen as not an external unknowable position, but within the existing capacity of human ontology.