SeedBroadcast

Describe your idea and concept of your work in relation to the festival outlines:

Technology and seeds have long been intertwined in a complex field of relations. Throughout history plants have cycled from seed to seed and humans have interjected their desire to be a part of this process, selecting, storing, and growing out these plants year after year for millennia. This encoded technology of relations was fed with an intention towards care and resiliency to nurture not only people, but also a polyculture community of the familiar. Relatively recently this intention has shifted towards engineering botanical processes to build mono-agricultural empires, create populations of dependent passivity, and dominate the more than human.

Since 2011, SeedBroadcast has been examining these territories through performative engagements as artists, farmers, gardeners, teachers, and collective operatives, while rethinking the term agri-Culture. Project concepts and methodologies are founded in a space of the grassroots, where culture, creativity, collaboration, and agency are coupled with open source technology, seeds, agro-ecology, rhizomatic networks, and most importantly the stories that bring these all together.

What kind of communication approach do you use?

SeedBroadcast deploys a broad approach to open-pollinating networks with seedy action. We mix and match digital media such as text, image, sound, video with heterogeneous mobile internet processes such as social media, blogging, and a project website with diverse original and pirated resources. A biannual agri-Culture Journal is published as a collection of personal manifestos from individuals across the world. This is distributed for free in both digital and old-school broadsheet form. These media rich environments allow us to be in multiple places at once and replicate connectivity across diverse environments and social conditions to counter the homogenization of monocultural industrialism and corporate patent regimes. These applications expand beyond the domain of binary code to make contact with the grassroots via the Mobile Seed Story Broadcasting Station, an old bread truck that has been retro-fitted into a solar-powered, seed story shout-out vehicle. The Broadcasting Station houses several multi-media systems for projecting seed stories in the public: exterior speakers, interior tablets, and video monitors. It also has an interactive bulletin board and copy center, which people can use for free to collect and disperse seed information. The bulletin board also acts as a display area where participants can post drawings, writings, thoughts, and pictures of their own. A library of books is available about seed saving, agri-culture, and seed freedom. Seeds are on display for people to look at, touch, and listen to. These seeds of radical technology are free to take home, grow-out, replicate, and share with others. The Broadcasting Station is also a literal recording station and editing suite for recording and broadcasting seed stories to make heard the voices of the commons.

What are in your opinion concrete benefits to the society because of your communication?

When discussing communication it is essential to remember that language is not only inherent in the human constructs of code, utterances, and the act of listening; it is also manifest in the relational history and agency of ecological interaction. This is not a top down approach to mere information dispersal, but a transformational act complexly shifting the living patterns between things. This is the unfolding life-line of people and seeds.

Our hope is to create a space for these diverse grassroots patterns to come to fruition and conflate, contradict, and decodify current power structures to cultivate the possibility for caring criticality through creative knowledge building and radical action.

What did you personally learn from creating your submitted work?

Since its inception, we as a collective, have learned and continue to learn to be generous, resilient, stubborn, and to keep moving. All of our projects will continue to change and respond to situational crisis, others' needs, and our own creative modus operandi. It is rhizomatic.

Why is your work, GOOD communication WORK?

Let us all throw away the desire to make good, because we will most likely see that this goodness is merely smoke and mirrors pointing us down the subservient path of popular culture. We do not judge our work on inherent value. We prefer to regard failure as a creative force.

Where and how do you intent do implement your work?

Already done and doing into 2015: mainly in USA, with collective nodes in Mexico, New Zealand, Australia, and India.

Did your intervention had an effect on other Media. If yes, describe the effect? (Has other media reported on it- how? Were you able to change other media with your work- how?)

Yes, our projects have been featured and our networks engaged through mass media, feature films, and social media. The most significant change we have promoted is a re-invigoration of the declaration of the genius(es) of the local. These are people, seeds, and lands who are actively living, working and creating resilient agri-Culture in action. (i.e not politicians, rock stars, corporations, or intelligencia).