Jemma foster

Wild alchemy lab

Winner of the Golden Nica for Digital Musics and Sound Art at Ars Electronica last year for her research in plant bioacoustics in: A Tale of Two Seeds: Sound and Silence in Latin America’s Andean Plains, Jemma’s work explores more-than-human intelligence, interspecies communication and emerging technologies. She challenges institutions and global leaders at climate summits such as COP to reconsider nature from a place of relationship rather than resource and to integrate effective methods of deep listening. She actively advocates for the sovereignty and rights of plants as sentient beings. If plants can see, taste, touch without the sensory organs of perception that we have, and in studies have demonstrated recognition, memory recall and problem solving, why continue to assume that they can’t also think, imagine, dream?

Jemma (she/her) is a multi-disciplinary artist, writer, curator, educator and practitioner of plant and vibrational medicine. She is the author of Sacred Geometry (Octopus, 2020) and Wild Alchemy Lab: An Astro-botanical Remedy Deck (Laurence King, 2023), with a new book out this autumn, Wild Alchemy Lab: An Astro-Botanical Guide to the Magic, Myth and Medicine of Plants (Laurence King, 2024). She is founder of immersive botanical studio Mama Xanadu and transmedia art collective Wild Alchemy Lab, which publishes an augmented-reality print journal exploring ecology, science and esoterica at the intersection of art and technology, featuring some of the world’s leading creatives and thinkers. She also co-founded award-winning creative studio Semantica, and their artworks have been commissioned by galleries and institutions and exhibited worldwide. Most recently, she has been exploring ways of listening and more-than-human dreaming, including an AR installation Dreaming With Stones at the ICA, London, and curating Oneiric Soils, a dreaming- with-plants residency for artists and researchers in Greece last year.

session description

Artist Jemma Foster will get us dreaming about the transformational potential of collaborating with more-than human intelligences. In an opening keynote designed to pique participants’ curiosity and imaginations: what innovations and solutions might emerge if plants—which make up 87% of life—are on our advisory boards? She’ll share her immersive, playful work investigating plant communication and interactions through sonic landscapes, electromagnetic and ultrasonic recordings, and sound studies highlighting the need to consider: what futures could we dream by dreaming with our non-human kin?

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Monika Jiang

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Emily Best and Sara M Watson