Peeter Laurits ”Haljas kõnetraat”

Since moving to Kütiorg (1996), Peeter Laurits’ interests revolve around wildlife and posthumanist ethics.

“The 21st century is marked by intensive research in plant consciousness and surprising discoveries in the way different life forms interact. At the same time, new computing technologies and emerging artificial intelligence are fundamentally changing our understanding of consciousness. New questions are emerging …

The adaptability of plant communities, communication channels and forms of cooperation are amazing. The contact between plant and human consciousness that artificial intelligence can soon cope with is one of the most exciting fantasies today. There are a number of dystopian scenarios associated with digital consciousness, but we do not have utopian developmental models as well.

In order to fertilize positive development models, we must first imagine them. The afterparty of current perceptions does not make more sense than a critical approach. Shaping and testing utopian scenarios for the future is our main task in the anthropocene. “

Peeter Laurits (b. 1962) has studied at Tartu and Leningrad State Universities, the Estonian Humanities Institute and the International Center of Photography in New York. Laurits’ main means of expression are photography and digital manipulations. In the nineties, he played media-critical games as part of DeStudio, but soon turned to deep ecology, moved to the forest, and combined neolithic and post-industrial principles in his life and work. At present, his work focuses on posthumanist ethics. He has enriched photographic means of expression and expanded the role of photography in the Estonian cultural space. Laurits has had solo exhibitions in London, Berlin, Moscow and Chiang Mai, and his works have been purchased in museums and private collections and monumental works have been commissioned in public. In 2017, he was invited to become a visiting professor of liberal arts at the University of Tartu.