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

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.

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

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.

Partnering with living ecosystems benefits humans too, as the plants provide cleansed air and the worms provide local waste disposal services. Worm composting keeps waste out of the landfill, saving us from generating more greenhouse gas. Methane is a greenhouse gas that is produced by rotting food, even inside of traditional, outdoor compost bins. Worm composting does not produce methane and it does not create odors. Breathe easy, and invite them into your home.

Special thanks to Joan Leonard and Ken Rinaldo advice on this project. More photos on Flickr.

An ecosystem artwork that transforms waste into a colorful indoor water feature for growing edible plants. Waste streams of uneaten food, old tea-bags, newspapers already read and throw-away plastic household objects are interrupted and turned into lettuce, basil, wheatgrass and herbs. The plants live in plastic containers sourced from thrift stores and they are fed by nutrient-rich water recycling throughout the system. All nutrients come from food and paper waste that is transformed by composting worms within the system. They hide beneath the layers of wheatgrass in the system.

This project was built during a week-long residency at Spaces Gallery in Cleveland, Ohio. It was part of the exhibition, Farmed: The New Agronomists. May 13 – July 10, 2011 Curated by Christopher Lynn. Artists in the show: Arzu Ozkal, Nanette Yannuzzi, Michael Mercil, Sara Rabinowitz and Amy Youngs.

My residency at Spaces Gallery was made possible in part through support from the National Performance Network’s Visual Artists Network. Major contributors are the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation.

Special thanks to the Spaces Gallery staff for their support and help with my project.

This project was exhibited at the RedLine Gallery in Denver, CO from July 5 – Aug 11 2010. In the exhibition Artists’ Footprints, curated by Viviane Le Courtois.

“Artists’ Footprints explores the boundaries of art and life through innovative systems of creation and production. Throughout this exhibition, artists compost, grow, reuse, and gather supplies to reduce their carbon footprint. Inspired by simple ways of living and creating across the world from Ecuador to Mongolia, artists offer alternatives to over-consumption.”

Artists in the exhibition: Jessica Moon Bernstein, Michael Brohman, Jane daPain, Fallen Fruit, Tsehai Johnson, David Kahn, Rian Kerrane, Rori Knudtson, Peter Menzel, Michael Reynolds, Musci, Patricia Tinajero and Amy Youngs. The exhibition is presented in partnership with the Biennial of the Americas and curated by RedLine artist in residence Viviane Le Courtois.