Exploring Interspecies Communication

Plant-Speak

Jessie Curry is the artist behind the Plant-Speak project, which explores through costume design the evolutionary entanglement between plants and humans. With an interest in examining the intersectionality between art, science, and nature, Jessie aims to reimagine humanity’s capacity for interspecies dialogues and the human role in a shared multi-species ecosystem.

Humans today perceive less than a ten-trillionth of the electromagnetic spectrum (David Eagleman, 2015). This limitation means that many species, including plants and algae, communicate in ways that extend far beyond human perception. This gap in understanding shapes our experience and influences our view of the world. Increasingly, an emerging field of research on plant communication aims to close this gap and reveal ancient, embodied languages and more-than-human intelligence (The Language of Plants, 2017).

Plant-Speak is one of those emerging research projects. It is  an immersive costume made from seaweed. It combines emerging research on plant communication with materials-led experimentation, to help audiences reflect on how interspecies communication has evolved over time transcending human sensory limitations. 

Jessie proposes a co-evolutionary scenario where understanding these ecological languages could reshape the human sense of the surrounding world and our relationship with other living organisms. This practice-based research project aims to inspire a sense of wonder and connectivity across species, challenging and expanding our understanding of the more-than-human world.

We at Haeckels are consistently intrigued by initiatives that push the boundaries of the more-than-human world. Our continued research aims to demonstrate how biomimicry through innovative materials can be used to communicate scientific knowledge. Jessie’s project demonstrates how materiality can create new visual transmission avenues that show us how we can learn from the diverse and sophisticated biological systems around us.