Plant Murmurs and Scripted Visibility: Some Rambling Notes Towards a Phenomenology of the Half-Seen and Half-Heard

Since I love mist and fog, yet again, my friends, I begin in the blur. I don't think blur is a failure of attention; rather, it is where attention might first start to become honest. The world does not come to me as a completed inventory of objects, each one obediently named, bordered, clarified, and filed away. It arrives as pressure, glimmer, atmosphere, interruption, edge, shimmer, opacity. It arrives before I have mastered it. It arrives, perhaps most truthfully, as something partially seen, partially withheld, and therefore vibrantly alive.

This has been the central intuition behind what I've been calling "scripted visibility": the sense that visibility itself is written, not in the narrow sense that the world is a text to be decoded, but in the deeper phenomenological sense that appearance is always articulated, scored, crossed, textured, and withheld. In my visual work, script does not simply lie on top of the image as decoration or caption. It does not explain the image. It does not domesticate it into language. Rather, script becomes a kind of weather inside the visible. It scratches, it veils, it thickens, it obscures, it summons, it interrupts. An elk emerges from it. A body is made of it. A marsh seems to have grown it. A wave appears to have written itself while breaking.

What interests me in these images is not the opposition between seeing and reading, but their mutual infection. I do not look first and then read, nor do I read first and then see. I hover between the two. I half-read the mark and half-see the body beneath or within it. The eye becomes tongue-like, trying to pronounce what it cannot decipher; the hand becomes atmospheric, leaving traces that do not settle comfortably into signs; the image becomes a field of almost-language. In that almost, something happens that is more important to me than clarity. The artwork refuses the old fantasy of transparency. It asks me to remain with appearance as an event of partial disclosure.

My current experiments in plant biosonification return me to this same threshold, but by another route. Instead of asking what it means for the visible to become script-like, I am now asking what it means for the inaudible life of a plant to become voice-like. Electrodes touch leaf, stem, soil. The Arduino receives fluctuating values, small changes in conductivity, contact, moisture, interference, perhaps something of plant physiology, perhaps something of the entire situation: room, wire, body, air, hand, visitor, machine. These signals pass into software and are mapped into sound. But the result I want is not a set of notes, not a pleasant botanical music, not a scientific display of plant data made charming for human ears. I am after something stranger: a stream of sound that approaches speech without becoming speech, a murmuring organism, a voice at the edge of language.

Here the analogy with scripted visibility becomes immediate and, for me, profound. In the visual work, I place the viewer before marks that appear to be writing but do not yield stable semantic content. They are seen as script, but they are not fully read as language. In the plant sonification work, I want the listener to hear articulations that seem almost linguistic but never quite arrive as words. The sound should make the body lean forward. It should produce that small, involuntary human reflex: Did it say something? Was that a syllable? Was that breath? Was that addressed to me? And then, just as quickly, the articulation dissolves into noise, resonance, vowel-color, friction, exhalation.

The visual work lives in the seen/unseen/half-seen. The plant voice lives in the heard/unheard/half-heard. I don't think these are separate aesthetic categories. They are sister conditions of embodied perception.

The half-seen is not merely what is badly seen. The half-heard is not merely what is poorly heard. Crucially, both are thresholds where perception becomes aware of itself. When I cannot entirely read the image, I become conscious of the bodily act of looking. My eye travels, hesitates, backtracks, and scans. It oscillates between figure and ground, between mark and image, between "this means" and "this appears." Similarly, when I cannot entirely understand the plant voice, I become conscious of listening as an embodied and interpretive act. My ear searches for phonemes and phoneme clusters, for rhythm, address, and intention. It catches something like "ah," "oo," "shee," "m," "lap," but these fragments do not assemble into speech. They remain suspended in a charged atmosphere between sound and sense.

This is why I do not want the plant to "speak" in the ordinary symbolic sense. I do not want to assign a plant signal to a word, as though a fern touching one voltage threshold should say "hello" and touching another threshold should say "water." That might be clever, perhaps, but it would also reduce the plant to a ventriloquized puppet of human language. It would make the plant say what I had already decided could be said. The deeper possibility is not translation but vocalization. The plant does not become a subject who speaks English badly. It becomes a body whose hidden electrical fluctuations are allowed to shape breath, pressure, vowel, noise, and rhythm.

This distinction matters a lot. Translation assumes that there is a message hidden inside the plant, waiting to be carried across into our language. Vocalization, by contrast, allows the plant to participate in the formation of an expressive field without pretending that the plant has secretly been human all along. The plant does not need to mean in the way I mean. It does not need to speak in order to be expressive. Indeed, I think, the most interesting thing may be that its expressiveness approaches the human without becoming even remotely human. It brushes up against the border of human language and withdraws.

So, in this sense the plant voice is an auditory version of the illegible script in my digital image artwork. My script-like marks ask to be read while refusing to become fully readable. The plant's quasi-speech solicits listening while refusing to become fully intelligible as speech. Both works create a desire for meaning and then frustrate that desire just enough to keep perception open. They do not negate meaning at all; they thicken it. They return meaning to its bodily and atmospheric origins.

Phenomenologically, this is crucial. Perception is not a beam of mental light thrown on inert objects: I do not stand outside the visible or the audible and inspect them from a sovereign distance. I am already implicated in the field. My body is not merely the apparatus through which I perceive; it is the site where the world's appearing takes hold. To see is to be caught in the visible. To hear is to be entered by the audible. The world does not simply present itself to me; it works on me, and thus arranges me, solicits me, and unsettles me.

This is why Merleau-Ponty's notion of flesh continues to shape my own thinking on all of this. Flesh names that middle element in which subject and object, seer and seen, toucher and touched, are not collapsed into one another but are, nevertheless, intertwined. In scripted visibility, the visible becomes fleshly because script is no longer a transparent sign system floating above the world. It becomes pressure and contour, atmosphere and skin. In plant sonification, sound becomes "fleshly" because the plant signal is not rendered as abstract information but as breath-like resonance. The plant's hidden electrical fluctuations are given a kind of throat—not a literal throat, but an acoustic body, a resonant cavity through which the unseen becomes an almost-address.

Physically, the electrode is important here. It is not just a technical device. It is a point of contact, a small locus of touching. The electrode touches the plant, but the plant also touches the circuit. The plant alters the current: it modulates the input, perturbs the system. The Arduino microprocessor receives these changes as data, as numbers, but these numbers are not the artwork; they are only the narrow gate through which one order of sensation is transformed into another. The interesting thing really happens when electrical variation becomes breath, when data turns into murmur, when conductivity shapes a vowel.

At this point, I want to be careful here not to romanticize the plant. The plant is not secretly speaking a language that we have forgotten. Nor do I want to pretend that the Arduino gives us some kind of direct access to the "inner life" of vegetal being. The installation is not a transparent window into plant consciousness. It is a constructed encounter, an aesthetic apparatus. It is a technological mediation. But that does not make it false. All perception is mediated. Sight is mediated by the body, memory, language, distance, light, and desire. Hearing is mediated by air, ear, room, expectation, and the learned patterning of articulated speech. Mediation is not the enemy of presence. It is the very condition through which presence occurs.

One question, then, is not whether the plant voice is "really" the plant. Instead, a better question is what kind of encounter the work stages between plant, machine, sound, and listener. Does it produce mastery, or does it produce attention? Does it make the plant legible in the impoverished sense of converting it into information, or does it allow the plant to remain partly opaque while still entering relation? My hope is for the second. I want the installation to create a field in which the plant is neither mute object nor anthropomorphized speaker, but a bodily participant in an event of partial disclosure.

I think that this is exactly where the link to scripted visibility becomes strongest. In the visual work, the image is not made more meaningful by being made more legible. Often the opposite is true. The illegibility of the script preserves the density of appearance. I want it to prevent the viewer from consuming the image too quickly. I want it to hold the eye in a state of active uncertainty. Likewise, the plant voice should not become more powerful by becoming more intelligible. If it becomes too speech-like, it collapses into novelty: a plant that talks. If it becomes too musical, it collapses into ambient sonification: a plant that plays tones. I'm thinking that the most charged zone lies between these. The plant almost speaks. The listener almost understands. The sound almost becomes language, but falls back into breath/static/noise.

From my perspective, this "almost" is not a weakness. I consider it the work's core.

In my images, almostness appears as the unstable relation between mark and world. Is this a forest that resembles handwriting, or is it handwriting that has become vegetative? Is this body covered by script, or is it script becoming a body? Is this wave shaped by script-like marks, or are the marks themselves wave-like events? I don't expect these questions to be answered with a no or a yes, because the work, really, lives in their reversibility. And I intend the same almostness to structure the plant installation. Is this sound a voice or a signal? Is it speech or noise? Is it expressive or accidental? Is the plant addressing me, or am I projecting address into the murmur? The answers should remain unsettled. The installation should not resolve the ambiguity. I want it to give the ambiguity room to breathe.

In this context, noise actually becomes essential. In ordinary communication theory, noise is what interferes with the message. In this work, noise is not merely interference but atmosphere. It is the audible equivalent of fog, blur, shadow, and overgrowth. It is what prevents the sound from becoming cleanly instrumental. It is also perhaps what makes the voice feel embodied. Human speech is never pure signal. It is made of breath, saliva, mouth, throat, hesitation, failure, proximity, fatigue. To strip speech of noise is to make it robotic. To keep noise is to keep the body.

The plant voice, then, is full of breath-bandwidth, soft frictions, airy consonants, formants sliding like uncertain mouths. In the SuperCollider code the various formant positions can shape vowel-like color: dark and/or open, narrow and/or plaintive. Noise might produce consonantal texture, but only as a kind of veil, a pressure, a hiss, an intriguing fricative weather. Amplitude envelopes can give the sound syllabic rhythm without forcing it into vocabulary. The plant's electrical changes do not select words; maybe I should say they shape an acoustic mouth. They open and close an aperture. They turn signal into utterance without turning utterance into statement.

So this is why the installation has to be spatial and bodily. The plant should not be represented on a screen as data, no matter how interesting it is to watch the numerical data flow. It has to be a presence in the room, materially there: leaves, soil, wires, electrodes, perhaps a slight tremble of contact, speakers placed around it or near it like a dispersed throat. The visitor should not merely hear a sound; they should encounter a situation. The visible plant, mostly still and familiar, becomes the source of an invisible activity. The audible murmur reveals that the visible object was never exhausted by its visibility. The plant we see is only the surface of a deeper field of processes, exchanges, flows, and sensitivities. Sonification does not uncover these processes completely. Ideally, it gives them a partial, unstable, aesthetic body.

Maybe I'm belaboring the point, but here again the seen and unseen fold into the heard and unheard. The plant's electrical life is unseen. The electrodes make contact with that unseen, but do not make it fully visible. Instead they transpose it into sound. Yet the sound itself is also incomplete in its half-heardness, its noise-veiled articulations, its almost linguistic gestures: the unseen does not become clear; it becomes audible as opacity. It becomes a murmuring.

One reason I find this deeply moving is because it resists the dominant technological fantasy of total capture. So much digital culture dreams of making everything legible: every face recognized, every gesture tracked, every preference predicted, every ambiguity converted into hard data. I am trying to have my work move in the opposite direction. It uses technology not to clarify the world into categorical obedience, but to restore the density of encounter. Scripted visibility uses digital image-making to produce opacity rather than transparency. Plant biosonification uses sensors and synthesis to produce a voice that cannot be reduced to a message. In both cases, technology becomes a means of re-enchanting ambiguity. Is it too much to say that I'm using the technology against itself, calling the technological bluff of mastery?

The last thing I want is for this to be seen as mystification. Could I call it an ethic of restraint, maybe? To leave something partly illegible or partly inaudible is to allow it to exceed me. It is to refuse the violence of total interpretation. Thus, the plant voice should not be treated as a code to be cracked and the script-image should not be treated as a puzzle to be solved. Both ask for a different mode of attention: dwelling, listening, looking, waiting, being affected without immediately translating affect into possession.

I hope there's a kind of humility in this. When I stand before my own script-saturated images, I am reminded that seeing is not mastery. When I listen to the plant murmur, I am reminded that hearing is not understanding. A world appears, but it does not surrender to me. It sounds, but it does not confess. It touches me, but I don't possess it.

Fundamentally, then, I imagine the installation as a room of thresholds. A plant stands in dim light. The electrodes are visible enough to suggest contact but not so prominent that they become the main subject. The speakers emit a low, breath-like, quasi-vocal stream. Perceptually, the visitor at first hears only atmosphere. Then, gradually, syllabic forms seem to emerge: an opening vowel, a swallowed consonant, a soft repeated pulse. The sound is intimate but not sentimentally romanticized. It is not a lullaby. It is not speech. It is closer to overhearing a body thinking in a language older than or other than words. Sometimes the murmur thickens when a visitor approaches. Sometimes it thins into almost silence. Sometimes it seems to address the room. Sometimes it withdraws into undulating noise.

What I want is that the visitor, like the viewer of my images, should be placed in a state of interpretive suspension. They are not told what the plant "means". They are invited to notice how meaning begins. And how does meaning begin? As rhythm, difference, recurrence, expectation, projection, breath. They may become aware of their own desire to humanize the sound, to hear a voice where there may only be signal. But instead of treating that desire as a mistake, the work can make it perceptible. Our human tendency to find language in noise becomes part of the piece. The plant, the machine, and the listener together create events of almost-speech.

Importantly, then, the installation does not simply sonify the plant. One way of putting it is to say that it sonifies the relation between plant and listener. The murmur happens in the circuit, of course, but it also happens in the ear, the room, in the expectation of address. Just as scripted visibility happens not only on the image surface but in the moving, reading, desiring eye, plant vocalization happens not only in the speaker but in the listening body. The piece is relational not because it contains an interactive mechanism, but because, as I argue, perception itself is relational.

And so, back to the blur. In the visual work, blur is where figure and script negotiate their unstable truce. In the sonic work, noise is where signal and speech enter their trembling proximity. Blur and noise are not defects to be eliminated but the generative media of appearance and address. They allow the work to remain alive because they prevent it from becoming exhausted by recognition.

As should be clear by now, I'm not trying to find a new way to make plants understandable but a way to make our relation to them more perceptible. The plant voice does not reveal some secret message from the plant. I think it reveals the poverty of my learned expectation that all expression must take the form of message. It asks me to listen before language, or beside language, or after language has begun to dissolve back into breath. It asks me to inhabit the threshold where articulation and opacity are not enemies but partners.

My technique of scripted visibility has been teaching me that the world can appear as writing without becoming readable. Plant biosonification now teaches me that the world can sound like speech without becoming speech. Between the two lies the field that most fascinates me: the chiasm of mark and murmur, sight and sound, body and world, signal and mystery. A field of half-seen inscriptions and half-heard utterances. A place where meaning trembles, not because of a failure, but because it is still in the act of becoming. If the world writes itself, perhaps it also murmurs itself. Perhaps every leaf is already a page and a throat, not in any literal sense, but in the more difficult phenomenological sense that each thing is a site of expression before it is an object of knowledge. I don't want to translate that expression into certainty. What I'd love to do is build conditions in which its uncertainty can be encountered:

To stand before the image and half-read. To stand beside the plant and half-hear. To remain there, implicated, listening with the eye, seeing with the ear, touched by what is always withdrawing.

That may be where the real work begins.