Organized by Allison Carruth and Rachel Lee,“The Cultural Politics of Seeds” symposium will look at how gender, ethnicity, and race shape contemporary cultural and political movements related to seeds. Conceived as a forum for integrating research, policy, activism, and art practice, this event will include day-long event with 3 panels and two keynote talks and a related art exhibit at UCLA’s Art/Sci Center featuring Fallen Fruit, the Los Angeles–based art collaborative. By bringing together farmers, artists, academics, and political organizers, the symposium demonstrates that to adequately examine seeds’ diverse functions in culture, taking a multifaceted approach is fundamental. “Moving into a century of 9 billion people and unprecedented pressures on the environment, there is nothing more important than how we will feed ourselves and the sustainability and equity of that enterprise,” says Glen M. MacDonald, Director and Distinguished Professor at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability about the upcoming event. “Here is a thoughtful and multifaceted exploration of that challenge.” Participants in the symposium come from across the country, including farmers, artists, academics, and political organizers. Several participants take several of these titles. For example, Stephen S. Jones, a professor, collaborates with graduate students to develop wheat for organic and small farms that are underserved by traditional research programs.

Elaine Gan, an artist, lecturer,vertical planter tower and Ph.D. student studying Film & Digital Media, is working on a multimedia web project that maps different varieties of rice and the ways in which they bring together bio-cultural entanglements and political economies. Artist-writer-critic Mathias Viegener will give a presentation on “Feral, Wild, Domestic and Social.” The symposium will include an installation by Fallen Fruit at UCLA Art/Sci Center + Lab . The event’s diverse presenters illuminate the inter-connections between individuals’ experiences working with seeds, and broader social and cultural systems. For example, Lucilia Martinez will give a co-presentation about her family’s development of a successful maize farm with ethnoecologist Daniela Solieri. Solieri works collaboratively with scientists and practitioners to analyze small-scale, local food systems, identifying key biological and sociocultural processes that may increase their resilience. The symposium will examine the ways in which seeds lead to the creation of social, political and artistic movements that intertwine with issues of gender, ethnicity, and race. It will explore how seeds become entangled with issues such as globalization, global climate change, and developments in genetic engineering and commodity markets. Finally, it will provide a forum for integrating research, policy, activism, and art practice. According to Carruth, “The symposium brings together an exciting group of scholars in the fields of cultural geography, gender studies, comparative literature, anthropology, environmental studies and science, and plant science along with the three co-founders of LA-based Fallen Fruit as well as longtime urban agriculture and food justice activist Tezozomoc.

We are fortunate to have had support from across campus to make this interdisciplinary conversation on the cultural politics of seeds possible.” “The Cultural Politics of Seeds” symposium is part of CSW’s multi-year “Life Ltd” research project, which is addressing the question of what impact recent developments in the bio-sciences and biotechnology have had on feminist studies. In this year, the group, led by Principal Investigator Rache Lee, is exploring the rich connections between food, ecology, propagation, and metabolism. Cosponsors of the symposium include University of California Humanities Research Initiative, Institute for Society and Genetics, Division of Life Sciences, Division of Humanities, Division of Social Sciences, Institute of American Cultures, Department of English, Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, School of Law, Chicano Studies Research Center, and Charles E. Young Research Library.How do people engage with fruit, and how does fruit engage with us? In what ways does fruit erect or problematize social boundaries? How can fruit bring people together, or tell us about the lives and behaviors of individuals? If fruit is endlessly intertwined with social and cultural politics, how can it become a means of positive change? These are some of the many questions raised by Fallen Fruit, a long-term art collaboration between visual artist David Burns, artist-writer-critic Mathias Viegener, and portrait photographer video artist Austin Young. Viegener will speak about one of the collaboration’s latest projects at the “Cultural Politics of Seeds” symposium hosted by CSW on May 17. Concurrently, an exhibition by Fallen Fruit will open at UCLA Art/Sci Center + Lab. Fallen Fruit began when the members of the group mapped fruit trees growing on or over public property in Los Angeles and it remains one of their core projects. In order to map local fruit, they explore neighborhoods to which they have been invited, creating maps of all the publically available fruit. Several of these maps will be on display at Art/Sci. Since first embarking on the fruit mapping project, the collaboration has expanded to include serialized public projects, site-specific installations, and happenings in cities throughout the world.

Fallen Fruit’s projects cover all media . Through its happenings and museum exhibitions, the group takes particular interest in working with public space and those who travel through it. At the symposium, Viegener will talk about Fallen Fruit’s pending public art project titled “Feral, Wild, Domestic and Social,” a one quarter-acre watermelon patch in the center of a small town in rural Alabama. During a brief residency in Fall 2012, the group learned that watermelons had once grown on vacant lots throughout the town, partly as the result of people spitting watermelon seeds in the vicinity. Over the years the lots became bare as the result of industrially produced seedless minimelons , sold in supermarkets nationwide. “Mother Patch” will be a public watermelon patch in which visitors will be encouraged to “spit their seeds” as they please, in the hopes that the land’s legacy of natural, community rooted watermelon production may begin again. “This narrative links to the variety of feral stone fruit we’ve found growing in Copenhagen, Northern California and Santa Fe, New Mexico,” says Viegener, in correspondence. “These plants have a symbiotic relationship with us, but a happier one than feral dogs or cats. We’re interested in this kind of peripatetic communal culture that not only links communities but also plants, animals and humans in significant relationships.” In addition to creating public spaces and events built upon the growing and harvesting of natural fruit, Fallen Fruit comments on the broad social implications of these events through the use of mixed media. Fallen Fruit’s 2008 video Double Standard, currently featured on their website, exemplifies how the collaboration melds real time public happenings with various forms of media in order to chart different ways in which fruit functions in society’s social and geographical structures, illuminating issues of sexuality, race, class, and the mediation of “public interaction.” The video juxtaposes unedited footage from two video cameras, documenting one of Fallen Fruit’s Neighborhood Fruit Forages, an event at which people gathered to take a tour of Los Angeles,growing strawberries vertically exploring public places where fruit grows. The videos are overlaid with a text block of comments from a short public television video of the same event that was posted on YouTube. The comments range from insightful to homophobic and racist, creating what the group’s website calls “an alternative, cynical narrative to the events.” The Neighborhood Fruit Forage was an effort to bring people together and consider the roles that fruit plays in public urban space. Double Standard incorporates the event with mixed media in order to challenge participants’ and viewers’ experiences. Fallen Fruit’s website points out that the video probes “at the correspondence between the public walking on the tour and the anonymous public of the internet.” This year, the group was also invited to do a project with TED Active. They devised “The Banana Hotline,“ wherein the public is invited to follow a set of instructions, record a memory, and email the audio or video to the group, who will then put together “a living monument of sound.” The exhibit at Art+Sci will also include The Loneliest Fruit in the World . This video portrays the human activities, interactions, and explorations that spring up around a stand of arctic berries growing near Tromsö, Norway: “Against a beautiful, spare landscape peppered with tiny blueberries,” according to the website description, “the video follows a group of Norwegians who while picking negotiate the relation between solitude, gleaning and company.” Integration of chemical signals at the peripheral sensory system remains one of the least understood mechanisms of insect olfaction, particularly in mosquitoes. Despite the great progress made in the last 2 decades in understanding how receptors form the basis of chemosensory perception in insects, how olfactory signals integrate at the periphery remains an enigma . ‘‘It is as if a new continent has been discovered but only the coastline has been mapped’’ .

In the largest majority of reported cases , antennal neurons of Cx. quinquefasciatus displayed excitatory responses , but evidence for inhibitory responses , already known for Ae. aegypti , is now emerging for Cx. quinquefasciatus . It has been observed in moths , beetles , the fruit fly , and mosquitoes that activation of one neuron interferes with signaling of other olfactory receptor neurons . It has also been reported that a single compound caused reduction of nerve impulse followed by a transient post-stimulus excitation . Although Carlson and collaborators elegantly demonstrated that in the fruit fly lateral inhibition is most likely mediated by ephaptic coupling , the complete ensemble of the molecular mechanism of inhibition at the peripheral olfactory system of mosquitoes remains terra incognita. A simple explanation of the ephaptic coupling is that, upon stimulation of an ORN, the potential declines. Consequently, per channel current generated by a cocompartmentalized neuron is reduced . This scenario argues that the firing of a neuron causes reduced spike frequency by a colocated neuron because of the close apposition of their neuronal processes. Although ephaptic coupling could explain lateral inhibition, other mechanisms of intraneuron inhibition may exist. While de-orphanizing odorant receptors expressed predominantly in Cx. quinquefasciatus female antennae, we serendipitously recorded currents from an OR that generate inhibition in response to certain odorants. Further studies unraveled a hitherto unknown mechanism of peripheral, intrareceptor inhibition in mosquito olfaction.In our attempts to de-orphanize ORs from the southern house mosquito, Cx. quinquefasciatus, we challenged Xenopus oocytes coexpressing CquiOR32 along with the obligatory coreceptor Orco with a panelof more than 200 compounds, including mostly physiologically and behaviorally relevant compounds . Because CquiOR32 is predominantly expressed in female antennae , we reasoned that this receptor might be involved in the reception of attractants or repellents. CquiOR32- CquiOrco-expressing oocytes generated dose-dependent inward currents when challenged with various odorants, including cyclohexanone, methyl salicylate, and 2-methyl-2-thiazoline . Interestingly, however, eucalyptol, fenchone, DEET, picaridin, IR3535, PMD, and other compounds generated currents in reverse direction thus resembling inverse agonists. These unusual currents of reverse direction were reproducible, and no indication was found of adaptation . No currents were recorded when oocytes alone or oocytes expressing only CquiOR32 or only CquiOrco were challenged either with methyl salicylate or eucalyptol . However, CquiOR32-CquiOrco-expressing oocytes responded to both compounds. Methyl salicylate elicited inward currents, and eucalyptol generated currents in the reverse direction in a dose-dependent manner .We then surmised that these ‘‘inhibitors’’ might modulate responses to odorants when these two types of stimuli are simultaneously delivered to receptors. First, we challenged a CquiOR32-CquiOrco-expressing oocyte with methyl salicylate and then eucalyptol and recorded regular and reverse currents, respectively . Then we challenged the same oocyte preparation with mixtures of methyl salicylate and eucalyptol. Binary mixtures with higher doses of eucalyptol elicited reverse currents. Inhibition was also observed with lower doses of eucalyptol, which generated dose-dependent reduced inward currents. A continuous trace displayed in Figure S4 shows no difference in the responses to methyl salicylate before and after these tests thus ruling out adaptation. Taking together, these findings suggest that ‘‘intrareceptor’’ inhibition occurred consistently with outward currents previously recorded from antennal neurons of the vinegar fly, Drosophila melanogaster .strong response to -2-hexenal unchanged . w1118 flies gave very weak responses to eucalyptol at high doses, but interestingly Orco-Gal4/UAS-CqOR32 flies generated dose-dependent, inverse EAG responses .