Bottomless Vale of Tears (2007-2017)

Bottomless Vale of Tears: Effects of Random and Regulated Noise on Plant Growth (BVOT) (2007-2017) is a work in which a diverse series of processes, intricate readings and research-based opportunities to analyze, legalities, fringe/pre-legitimized science, and social connection to place and non-human life are performed. Plants were put in scenarios in which opportunities to bond, build trust, and be nurtured were to be put into situations of work and witnessing crimes to later be used to verify or debunk further crimes. in BVOT examination manipulation, and most sinisterly forging of memory of plants using techniques from art, musical composition, and data analysis is performed. A series of scenarios where the potentially ontological, systems and our potential relationship to these strategies are accessed and interacted with interrogating trends in sculpture, art and life, modernisms utilization of duration, transgression, the manipulation of systematization and questions of labor. This is then cross referenced with parallel research into radionics and primary perception (plant consciousness) and put against very traditional notions of research and practice in which plants when exposed to instances of adaptation, memory, truth, and the forging of these separate strands. These plants will occupy the realm of viewer be pitted against plastic plants and other non-plant-based viewers. When this is completed plants will be monitored utilizing different historical and advanced techniques for monitoring their memories, and knowledge.

These strategies were then coupled and played against a human counterpart dealing with recall, space, interrogation, representation, and the privileging of the human by manipulating pathos. Ultimately these experiments will result in a pool of information and data which will be composed into a musical form for maximum absorption. By comparing these pools of data/media and playing them off of each other, the witness, and the location of witnessing a test in memory based on proprioception can be formed and tested out against itself.

The exhibition was accompanied by the First portion of a research journal on the progress of the process, a history of primary perception and it’s counterintelligence connection, the shift to the “new age” and myths of plants and music are noted.

Alan S. Tofighi