To celebrate and share these soil critters, I converted an older worm‑bin sound sculpture into a wagon with a live, infrared webcam. Detritivores work in the dark. They do not announce their important role in mitigating climate change by processing food waste without methane emissions, nor do they speak about circulating nutrients and healthy microbes throughout the world’s soils. I’m sharing this on their behalf because I hope others will develop regenerative relationships with composting ecosystems.

The Mobile Soil Maker showcases a type of worm composting system that is well-suited for domestic spaces. It helps me share information, answer questions, and distribute starter bags on the spot for people who are ready to co-habitate with worms. They are always free because they are abundant–and removing a few bags full of worms from the Mobile Soil Maker creates more abundance. The ecosystem repopulates to size of the bin, and those who are taken into new homes gain new habitat spaces to grow into. This is akin to the gift economy that Robin Wall Kimmerer describes in her essay The Serviceberrry, an economy of abundance.

Applying the lessons of compost to my art practice

I needed more space to make art, so I have been breaking down old art installations that filled up my studio. Reusable parts are being recycled into new projects. The furry section of the Mobile Soil Maker was a part of a sound installation that amplified the sounds of worms (Intraterrestrial Soundings). The plastics I used to build much of this old work in 2004 are not compostable, so the best I can do is re-use and give parts away. The giant couch part ended up going to a tattoo parlor in my neighborhood. Many of my current projects use materials that detritivores can eat – and I am looking forward to watching some of these projects biodegrade inside the Mobile Soil Maker.

Using a microscope camera and audio/visualization techniques, we are tracking a population of springtails inside a custom-made terrarium. Springtails (collembola) are abundant arthropods, found in soils throughout the world. They are important to soil health, as they graze on bacteria and fungi, disperse spores, and keep the nutrients cycling throughout soil.

To help humans notice their individual interactions, we projected them large and programmed colored dots to share their varying speeds; with blue dots showing their slower movements and red dots showing the fastest. 

The sounds are also changing live, based on their movements. We don’t know what the sounds of this soil, or these springtails, are actually like, so we have developed a kind of speculative sonification based on the sounds of a forest. Like forest sounds and like ambient music, soil is present but fades from our notice most of the time. When we do pay attention to the complex life in soil ecosystems, we can be rewarded with a sense of wonder.

Viewers can interact with this system by moving the computer mouse to experience an altered soundscape – and perhaps imagine themselves as a tiny cursor in the world of the springtails.

This project is a collaboration with artists Alena Sun, Brian Trelegan, and David King. We were fortunate to be able to work with David’s amazing glass art crew: Gayle Van Martel, David Foster, Su Fan and Max Kleinmann, in the glass art facility at the Ohio State University.

The work was exhibited in, Those Who Feed Us, an art show celebrating Ohio Soil Health Week, which included Marcia Armstrong, Ken Rinaldo, Mandy Darrington, Adelaine Muth, Eve Warnock, Pelham Johnston, Kim Landsbergen, Janette Knowles, Raman Ebrahimi, Thomas Ellsworth, Daniel Gingerich, Parinaz Naghizadeh, Kyoung Swearingen, Scott Swearingen, and Robyn Wilson.

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INSPIRATIONS:

• Springtails
• Shadrick Addy and Jian Chen, my co-principal investigators of the Nonhuman Storytellers Generating Impressionistic Story Ecologies project, an interdisciplinary grant project funded by the College of Arts and Humanities and Computer Science Engineering, which gave rise to this offshoot artwork.
• The student researchers who worked on the Nonhuman Storytellers Generating Impressionistic Story Ecologies project: Nate Garthwaite, Alena Sun, Ashim Dhakal, Shuning Jiang, Isabel Nixon, and Chenzhuo Tong.
• Artists: Julie Freeman, Ken Rinaldo, and Laura Beloff
• A Chaos of Delight, informative website featuring soil mesofauna, by macro photographer and writer Andy Murray.

This virtual reality experience is based on an important ecological reality. The intricately interwoven ecosystem of soil contains billions of tiny creatures that our lives depend upon. How can we meet our friends who are doing the important work of absorbing waste and transforming it into healthy fertilizer that feeds the plants, which feed animals, like us?  How can we see and experience these fascinating creatures who have complex, symbiotic relationships with each other?

Belonging to Soil is a simulation of the world of a springtail, a tiny creature living in soil ecosystems throughout the world. You inhabit the body of this arthropod avatar so you can travel as it does; riding on a flying ant to find new territory, leaping through the air to escape predators, swimming in a pond to catch and eat water bears, crawling underground to see the beauty there, exploring tunnels made by worms, eating sporulating soil bacteria, feeding on plant roots, and dancing with friends.

The world inside the headset may look and feel like fantasy, but it is based on scientific knowledge. The research for this project involved reading scientific papers about springtails and their interactions with others in the soil ecosystem, as well as the observation of live springtails over three years, which I have cultivated in a variety of terrariums. The cartoonish avatar does not even come close to capturing the complexity of the actual springtails I observed. Their quick movements, their air-sensitive hairs, and acrobatics were not technically possible to include in a virtual reality system that assumes a human is controlling it.

How would a human use their body to control six legs, plus two antennae, plus a furcula, which is the spring-loaded “tail” that activates their high-speed jumping? We don’t have enough limbs or even buttons on the virtual reality controllers to map to the actions of an actual springtail. It is humbling to attempt to simulate the operation of their bodies. It was also frustrating to working with a game engine that privileges two-legged, two-armed, upright-walking avatars. Our current avatar is a compromised in many ways: it walks upright, has only four legs, and its antennas are simply automated, not controllable. Nevertheless, we found ways to program the system so that users could experience jumping, eating, and “soil-making” (pooping) through particular body movements.

About Springtails

• They are arthropods, who have a spring-loaded jumping organ that allows them to “hyperspace jump” – up and away from predators.
• They help build healthy soils by grazing on fungi, bacteria, and decaying matter, and by turning these into nutrients that plants can eat through their roots.
• The “earthy scent” that often occurs after it rains is due to a symbiotic relationship that a type of bacteria (streptomyces) have formed with springtails. The bacteria creates the scent to attract springtails, who help the bacteria by spreading their spores (kind of like seeds) throughout the soil where new colonies can grow. The springtails are rewarded by a meal of bacteria, who are in the last stages of their lives when they are producing their spores.
• Fossilized springtails have been discovered in amber, clinging to the bodies of flying insects, causing scientists to believe that this is one method they used to travel and populate most types of terrestrial environments.
• They come in many types and colors, but they are so small and are often underground, so you might never see them.

This is a collaborative project, with Shadrick Addy (Designer), Mayen McClain (3D Environment Artist), Luke Stephens (3D Character Designer), JT Thrash (Lead Programmer), Andrew Sanchez (Programmer), Josh Rodenberg (Musician), Megan Wright (Designer), and William Yuan (3D Artist).

This project is supported by a grant from the College of Arts & Sciences, The Ohio State University.

Special thanks to the Emerging Technology Studio

Machine Garden was installed in the lobby of the art building at the University of Maine where it was cared for by students and staff for 3 years. Adjacent to this installation was a student-run coffee shop that generated a waste stream of coffee grounds. The grounds were placed under the hat at the top of the “worm hive” section. By the time this section filled up, the bottom container would be finished compost, which was used to fertilize other plants, both inside and outside the building. Each hive section would be moved to the shelf below, with the empty one becoming the top, ready for more food waste. Worms migrate to the new food source through the holes in the bottom of each section. Additional connected tube highways enabled the worms to travel from their hive to the soil of the planters, enriching and aerating it as they go.

Ken Rinaldo and I collaborated to create Machine Garden during our residency at the University of Maine’s Innovation Media Research Center (IMRC). We had the great help of the people and facilities there. Special thanks to Gene Felice, Sean Michael Taylor, Reed, Rachel Alexandrou, and Amy Pierce.

Dead Bird Map

 
I would like to thank Stephanie Malinich of the Tetrapod collection at the Museum of Biological Diversity for the loan of these birds. I would also like to thank artist Allison Blair, whose dead bird project at Hopkins Hall inspired me.

A public Flickr page hosts the photos that are taken by the camera in the photo booth. They are uploaded via an automated wifi camera card and searchable via hashtag #WormSelfie on Flickr and Twitter.

Catalog text

How can our human connection to, and reliance upon, the non-human be sensed?

I “know” that the collection of cells that comprises my body depends on inputs and outputs to the world outside my body, but that relationship is often invisible and unfelt. If I am thirsty I might sense the rain or a river in an more potent way, but, it is more likely that I will feel immediately interconnected with the money in my pocket and the corner store that enables the purchase of a bottle of water. The human-constructed interfaces to the non-human world are convenient, yet distancing. Packaging, stores, trashcans and toilets allow me to fantasize that I am an independent being, as long as I have the ability to purchase food, water, and services. But I am not independent from the ecosystem.

A handshake is a ritual of greeting, an acknowledgement of equality, a sealing of an agreement and a demonstration of respect. With this in mind, I created a situation where I could publicly shake hands with a group of composting worms. A worm bin with a live network webcam attached to the top was a way to broadcast the event. The red wiggler worms were collected from another worm bin in my home. I held them in my hand and felt the gentle movement of their fleshy, moist bodies fed by waste generated from my own household –newspaper, wilted lettuce, apple cores, coffee grounds, and leftover toast. These worms are the continuation of a colony of worms that have been with me for twenty years. We have shared many meals. They have transformed my waste products into fertilizer that I have fed to my houseplants, tomato plants, basil and strawberry plants. Once in awhile, when I bite into the juiciest strawberry, I remember to thank the worms for their part.

Of course the worms are just one small part of the cycle that transforms waste material into soil nutrients and back to human-ingestible food. There are also invisible forces, such as microbes and photosynthesis that I have not figured out how to shake hands with yet. Even the worms are difficult to apprehend. It is in their nature to hide away from visible light, which can harm them. To keep them safe, I staged the handshake inside a dark box. An infra-red light placed inside was invisible to my eye and to the light detectors of the worms, but sensed by the camera documenting the event. This extrasensory, technological agent allows us to see beyond our biological senses and it provides a view into the interconnected system that we participate in. The networked camera revealed the event as it unfolded in a three-hour timespan, but the span of human attention does not easily match this scale. I chose to time-lapse and color-enhance the documentation as a way to shift it towards human perception. I endeavor to employ technology in this way; as a means of highlighting the interdependent systems that include all of us – worms, people, dirt, cameras and ecosystems.

Time lapse videos were also produced. This one above shows an amplified perspective of the transformation of waste into fertilizer. This video reveals the awesome efficiency of these soil organisms and reminds me that human life depends upon them. When the worm bin lid is opened the scene is visible in color (the camera switches from infra-red to color mode).

Multiple LIVE Feedings occurred over four months, with the wormbin webcam live streaming 24/7.

Composting worms are excellent co-habitants that can help us reduce our greenhouse gas output by eating waste paper and food scraps that would otherwise be sent to landfills, which generate methane. Local, in-home worms can transform domestic organic waste into a rich, nutritious fertilizer that can be fed to houseplants, food gardens, trees or lawns. Worm ecosystems are odor-free, silent and thrive in dark, moist places with food, so they will not want to leave their worm cozy. I understand that some people are squeamish about the idea of living with worms, which is why these cozies are designed to be friendly, fuzzy, and discrete.

This project premiered in Lüedenscheid, Germany at LichtRouten 2013, an International Forum of Light in Art and Design. September 27 – 6 October 2013. Artistic directors: Bettina Pelz and Tom Groll. The theme was “The Art of Projection” as the citywide installations took place throughout areas of urban redevelopment.

Artists in the show: Jürgen Albrecht, Refik Anadol, Atsara, Catherine Berndt, Cuppetelli + Mendoza, Christoph Girardet, Hartung + Trenz, Joseph O. Homes, Dieter Kiessling, Jakob Mattner, László Moholy-Nagy, Klaus Obermaier, Rainer Plum, Quayola, Diana Ramaekers, Nicolas Schöffer, Robert Sochacki, Max Sudhues and Amy Youngs.

Thanks to the LichtRouten Lüedenscheid directors, technicians and staff for their support and assistance with my project. Thanks to the Ohio State University faculty research enhancement grant for additional support to help create this work.