Living roots form intimate relationships with fungi, bacteria, soil organisms, and other plants. Charles Darwin proposed that the root tip functions like a brain—sensitive to conditions around it and capable of directing growth in response to external stimuli. These decisions unfold through dynamic changes in movement and orientation. This “root-brain” hypothesis has been advanced by scientists today, who are uncovering the chemical signals that plant roots are using to communicate.[1] They are defining the emerging, much debated field of plant neurobiology.

The roots in this sculpture come from exceptionally vigorous plants weeded from our yard, dead plants abandoned in neighborhood alleyways, and culled specimens from the biological sciences greenhouse at our university.

Created with Ken Rinaldo, for our duo exhibition “Symbiotic Worlds: Symbiogenesis in Art”, at the University of Texas, Dallas.

Special thanks to our curator and supporter curated by Dr. Charissa Terranova. Also to Trademark Gunderson for project assistance and video editing.

1. Baluška, František, Stefano Mancuso, Dieter Volkmann, and Peter Barlow. “The ‘Root-Brain’ Hypothesis of Charles and Francis Darwin: Revival after More than 125 Years.” Plant Signaling & Behavior 4, no. 12 (2009): 1121–27. Open Access article.

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

Wheatgrass seeds are sown into a bed of agar agar, where their roots weave into strands of fiber optic cables.

Agar agar is an algae-based growth medium that offers food and support for the grass’ roots in the absence of soil. Red seaweeds, which are a type of algae, produce this gelatinous substance to enable flexibility and adaptation in their wavy, ocean environments. Humans have found it useful as a food too, and we enjoy its jelly-like qualities in cakes, ice creams, candies, and canned meats.

The transparency of agar agar reveals how roots weave themselves together, over, under, and around the strands of fiber optic cables also embedded within the medium. The cables are like those that transmit telecommunication signals under oceans and over land, carrying our data, our voices, and videos of loved ones to screens far away. In this tapestry, the fiber optic cables carry visible light; waving through seaweed media and illuminating the intelligence of plant roots.

INSPIRATIONS: This work arises from over a year of intense focus on plant roots.. These experiences and references were important to the process:

• An Artist Residency at Folly Tree Arboretum, where I explored root growth in multiple ways, including digging up weeds at the arboretum and turning them into sculptures by painting them blue with non-toxic paints.
• Co-teaching a class with Iris Meier called “The Art and Science of Roots” at the Ohio State University. Together, with graduate and undergraduate students, we experimented with plant roots and learned about the rhizosphere; the rich world of biodiversity that surrounds them.
• Scientific papers such as, “Fiber Optics in Plants” that demonstrate that roots have light-guiding capabilities and they give information to plants that influence their growth.
• The artists and scientists of the Algae Society, whose creative work raised my awareness of the importance and ubiquity of algae. Seaweed is an algae and agar is made of it.
• Artists: Diana Scherer and Zena Holloway.

Project statement: As our ancestors, plants are more than just food, shelter, and oxygen producers. They have been intimately involved in shaping the human species. They arrived on earth millions of years before us and our bodies evolved to interact with them. Our eyes can detect the colors of their ripe fruits, our tongues can taste them, and our fingers are shaped to pluck, shuck, peel, weave, and plant them. Yet, I know so little about their ways of being in our shared world. With the hope of learning, I read many books. This led to a desire to know them in ways that did not privilege human language, so I began to observe them more closely; first by taking their portraits, then by sharing space and time with them in photographs and videos. I developed a regular practice I call plant noticing, which allows my eyes to be curious about them, my hands to be guided by the pleasure of their shapes and textures, and my cellphone to capture our time in the light together. 

Un-becoming Carbon: Traveling in Intercellular Space focuses on the importance of carbon sequestration by plants. The viewers enter the plants’ intercellular space, beginning their journey as a molecule of carbon dioxide, donating their carbon to the plant’s body, and emerging as life-giving oxygen. The interactive installation explores this process through physical, audio and virtual experiences. Entering a giant leaf through a stomatal opening, the viewers are surrounded by sculptural plant cells. Palisade Parenchyma droop from above while below Spongy Parenchyma and Stomata line the floor. Soft structures invite viewers to rest and continue their experience by entering virtual reality. An exploration between the macroverse and the microverse begins in a forest where the viewers take on the role of a carbon particle being absorbed into a leaf; first traveling through intercellular space, then moving into a cell to become part of its substance.

Concluding the experience, visitors are invited to adopt and nurture a living plant propagule to continue its carbon-binding work in their own home. Information about how to become a good plant ally is given out, along with plant awareness posters, as souvenirs of intercellular space travel.

This collaborative art installation was created in an Art & Science class at the Ohio State University. Team members: Ellie Bartlett, Jacklyn Brickman, Ashley Browne, Amanda Buckeye, Diva Colter, Mona Gazala, Youji Han, Saba Hashemi Shahraki, Brice Jordan, Liam Manning, Iris Meier, Brooke Stanley, Lily Thompson, Zachary Upperman, Stephen White, Taylor Woodie, and Amy Youngs.

Screencapture from the VR experience

Special thanks to our supporters:

Livable Futures, a project of the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme, in partnership with the College of Arts and Sciences Technology Services, the Department of Art, and the Department of Molecular Genetics at the Ohio State University.

And thanks to the following individuals who presented in our class:

Candace Thompson, Dr. Peter Curtis, Dr. Anna Dobritsa and Eduardo Acosta.

Art & Science, ART 5001

Taught by Dr. Iris Meier and Amy Youngs at the Ohio State University. Each year we select a theme related to our research interests; usually involving plants, systems, and environment. To see photos of our class activites visit our Flickr pics. Or read more about our process and view our previous class project, Where Rocks are Fed to Trees.

Life-giving oxygen, passing through our human lips into our lungs, is exhaled from the lips of plants. This intimate relationship is one we are utterly dependent upon, yet one that plants can survive without. Magnified plant skins show the structure of their lip-like pores, stomata, to be similar to ours.

Microscopy is used to create images from the skins from the leaves of three different plants. The skins of all terrestrial plants contain stomata, which are shaped like human lips and function in a perfectly complementary way. They exhale oxygen while we inhale it – and they inhale carbon dioxide while we exhale it. In plants, these specialized structures are slightly different across species, and surrounded by interlocking pavement cells, which are also distinctive. The plants chosen are symbolic of the cities the work would be exhibited in for the Festival Arte & Ciencia Trans-Disciplinar & Trans-Nacional (FACTT).

Lisbon = Jacaranda

New York = Rose

Mexico City = Dahlia Pinnata

Each of the images of plant skins becomes its own “body” through transformation into a printed patterned fabric. Each is sewn into the shape and size that deflated human skin would take (if it no body were inside it). In the place where a “head” would be, is a live specimen of the plant that is represented in the skins.

I did much of the imaging for the project at a fantastic residency in Portugal, Cultivamos Cultura. I learned a stomata microscopy technique using superglue to imprint of leaves onto slides. Thank you to Alecia Biel and the Meier Lab at the Ohio State University for teaching me this. Thank you to the Institute of Molecular Medicine, University of Lisbon for additional microscopy assistance.

Thank you to Marta De Menezes for curating this work in the FACTT exhibition and for the photos of the installation at Mute Gallery.

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.

Becoming Biodiversity is an augmented reality application that encourages participants to explore and experience local, ecological networks present in an urban park site. Cell phones and headphones are used to experience this artwork, which includes mixed-reality animations and storytelling as an overlay to the actual park. The experience is an embodied one, designed to connect humans empathetically with the biodiversity, symbioses, and unseen worlds in public park spaces.

Fantastic ecologies exist everywhere on earth and at many scales, many of which are invisible to us. Though we mostly ignore and disrespect the non-humans in these networks, our lives depend upon them. This artwork is a guided tour which will allow us to inhabit the worlds of multiple species along the network, allowing them to become visible and “sense-able” to us. The viewer re-enacts stories from the perspectives of non-humans; playing the part of a plant calling out to a bird to help with pest control, an ant planting spring flowers while simultaneously feeding her babies, an underground fungal network delivering goods to struggling trees, and a cormorant searching for a meal in a man-made lake in New York City.

There are 8 scenes, each takes place at Willow Lake, on the South end of Flushing Meadows Corona Park. The starting point for the app tour is the East entrance of the Pat Dolan Trail, right after walking over the Van Wyck Expressway pedestrian bridge. This is near the Mauro Playground. The tour takes about 26 minutes and the one-way walk down the trail is less than a mile.

“We are therefore called into gratitude for the fact that in the midst of terrible destruction, life finds ways to flourish, and that the shimmer of life does indeed include us.”  – Deborah Rose Bird

This freshwater wetlands park in the middle of Queens, New York, was originally a saltwater marsh, then a dumping ground full of ash and trash, then reconstructed as 2 freshwater lakes for the 1938 World’s Fair. The area also hosted the 1964 World’s Fair and soon after that it was designated as an official park. For a short history of Flushing Meadows Corona Park visit the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation webpage.  Additional sources included in the bibliography page for this project.

Team
This project was made in collaboration with 3 important team members. Each are artists who have offered valuable advice in addition to brilliant skills: Josh Rodenberg is the audio artist, Danielle McPhatter provided programming (and teaching), and Jayne Kennedy created 3D Animations.

Supporters
The production was made possible through a commission of Harvestworks, with residency and research support of the New York Urban Field Station, and time made possible by a sabbatical granted by the Ohio State University.

Tools
Unity3D, Vuforia, Maya, Sketchbook, After Effects, Photoshop, Audacity, Ableton, iNaturalist

Bibliography
Conceptual influences for this project include books by Donna Haraway, David Abram, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and artworks by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Mel Chin, Tamiko Thiel, plus various scientific articles, and so much more. After a year of research, this list grew too big for one page. Now listed and linked in the project bibliography page.

Experience
The augmented reality art app was published for free in the Apple and Android app stores from 2019 – 2024. While the visual portion is no longer available, there are 2 versions of the audio tour experience.

• Audio version with map published by (Re) Verb. It is free and available in a web browser.
• Audio also available on Soundcloud

Related Project: Grasping Permeability: Flushing Meadows Corona Park

To experience scientific facts, which seem like fiction, the students and faculty of an art/science course created this installation, which models a fungal tunnel inside a plant cell and their symbiotic exchange of goods. The collaborative team sought to make science tangible, and to go beyond “visualization”.

An embodied, participatory experience was created that engaged all the senses. Modeling science was brought into a human scale and sensory understanding through movement, sound, vision, smell and taste. The smell of dirt was present, through bags of soil placed inside the tunnel and the addition of a synthetic soil fragrance, geosmin. At the end of the tunnel there was a rock candy treat that participants exchanged for their mineral bracelet. It included a short text which explained: “You are a fungal body particle on its way into the depths of a plant’s private parts, its roots. Delivering your mineral, you are rewarded with sugar.  Use it well, grow your network, and trade in peace”.

The experience allowed us  – and visitors to the exhibition – to inhabit and “enact” the story of underground symbiosis.

Process

The collaboration between Dr. Iris Meier and Amy Youngs began three years previous to this project, when we first developed and taught a course called Harvesting Color: the Art and Science of Plant/Human Relationships. We have figured out symbiotic methods of teaching and working together and that acknowledges our distinct disciplines and our shared values. Often, for scientists, art is thought to be a good tool for visualizing or communicating science to the public. For artists, science is a powerful part of culture that we want to play with in our meaning-making projects.

These motivations can sometimes be at odds during collaborations between our fields. We acknowledge that tension, and we work to focus on the areas where our motivations overlap. Generating work that can convey a sense of wonder is one of the reasons we collaborate.

Artists have important roles as cultural integrators of new scientific knowledge. Humans are not data-driven; we are story-driven.

We designed our most recent course, Underground Symbiosis: the art and science of mycorrhizal networks, to allow for an integrated approach to research, and co-creation within a classroom setting. We set out to co-author an artwork with each other that included all of the students in our class.

To begin, we used multiple modes to approach an understanding of the topic of symbiotic, mycorrhizal networks.

We practiced scientific methods, such as experiment design, and techniques such as microscopy, staining samples, and thin layer chromatography. We kept field notebooks to document our scientific experiments as well as our artistic experiments, drawings and ideas.

We grew soybeans plants, experimenting with adding symbiotic bacteria in some and nitrogen fertilizer in others. The images and ideas generated from the scientific experiments were often utilized in art assignments. Students produced short-term artworks in pairs; using artistic strategies such as amplification, transformation, combination, juxtaposition, distillation and metaphor.

Inspirations

We looked at artwork, reached out to experts, and visited several campus labs, such as the confocal microscope facility. All the while, we are asking each other, how do we convey this information to the public in an art installation?

We were inspired by a blog post in Scientific American “The World’s Largest Mining Operation is Run by Fungi”. This new knowledge really puts humans in our place, reminding us that we are not the most industrious. Scraping minerals out of rocks, fungi deliver them to plants. This story is ancient, as evidence of mycorrhizal fungi inhabiting plant cells comes from fossils more than 400 million years old. Fungi are invited to tunnel directly into the cells of plants, where they trade their mined minerals for the sugars that plants make. In order to live, fungi must find plant hosts. Plants have encouraged this symbiotic relationship for millennia; it may be vital for their continued survival.

Our installation, Where Rocks are Fed to Trees, models this interaction; casting human visitors as fungal particles, entering into the plant cell to re-enact a symbiotic relationship that has been occurring underground long before the appearance of humans on earth.

Links to learn more about the fascinating symbiosis between plants and fungi:

• RadioLab episode, From Tree to Shining Tree
• BBC Plants Talk to Each Other Using an Internet of Fungus
• The New Yorker The Secrets of the Wood Wide Web

Scientific references:

Suzanne Simard (University of British Columbia), Giles Oldroyd (John Innes Centre), Maria Harrison (Boyce Thompson Institute), Uta Paszkowski (Cambridge).

Artist references:

Jorge Restrepo, Tomas Saraceno, Philip Beesley, Brandon Ballengee, Mei Ling-Hom, Ronald Van Der Meijs, Carsten Holler, Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey, Philip Ross, Gail Wight, Jae Rhim Lee, Mark Dion, Anil Podgornik.

Special thanks to our supporters:

The Department of Molecular Genetics, The Department of Art, College of Arts and Sciences Small Grant Program, Biological Sciences Greenhouse, and the Chadwick Arboretum

And thanks to the following individuals:

Eduardo Acosta, Dr. Ana Alonso, Jean-Christophe Cocuron, Dr. Anna Dobritsa, Anna Griffis, Norman Groves, Kim Landsbergen, Joan Leonard, Galen Rask, and Emily Yoders-Horn.

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.