Thinking about next week’s Post-Planetary Capital Symposium at the New School/Parson’s Center of Transformative Media reminded me of a short text I had included in a strange event/exhibition at Princeton’s Institute of the Humanities last May called The Secret Life of Plants . I didn’t get to see the exhibition and missed the event with Jane Bennett as I was not in town at the time but I’ve included my text below. It appeared with the image below enlarged on a wall (although I never saw images of it).
ALIEN WEEDS: The Origins of Life on an Uncanny Planet
In January 2013 it was reported in The Huffington Post that Chandra Wickramasinghe of the University of Buckingham, U.K. and a team of researchers at Cardiff University, U.K. had found traces of fossilized algae in a meteorite that landed in the Sri Lankan village of Polonnaruwa on December 29th the previous year. Although the results of their research were immediately disputed by other astronomers when published in the March 2013 edition of the Journal of Cosmology , Wickramasinghe and his team argue that