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. 

This virtual reality installation invites viewers to interact with images by grasping them with the controllers in hand. There is a spatial simulation made out of photographs I took at Flushing Meadows Corona Park in New York City. The experience is designed to alter the viewer’s sense of self in relation to the hollow virtual skins – the surface representations of place. The ring of phragmites plants provide a semi-permeable layer that can be touched by real and virtual hands.

• How can a place that is not here show itself? 
• Can a landscape include me as a part of it?

These are the questions I asked as an artist in residence at Flushing Meadows Corona Park in New York City. This urban, freshwater wetland was once a saltwater marsh whose history includes layers of trash dumping, landfilling, water re-engineering, and paving to accommodate two worlds fairs. I focused on one area in this park undergoing restoration, called Willow Lake Preserve. Resting upon anthropogenic soil and ringed by auto expressways that add harmful effluents, this wetland area hosts a variety of birds, small mammals, fish, and a tangle of fungi and plants. Many “invasive” species such as common reed (phragmites australis) thrive, due to the conditions humans have provided there. After driving to the site, I could see the effects of my own actions on the place as I saw the shimmering petroleum floating on the water. A tiny snail moves through it anyway, like me, filtering some through her porous body.

Wetlands Skins are real material representations of Flushing Meadows Corona Park and companions to the virtual experience. They were created by dipping paper into the colorful – often iridescent –  water that emerges from the wetlands.

Related Project: Becoming Biodiversity

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.

The wallpaper is for sale online here. Thank you to Kunst Press and Extrapool, for supporting this project.

The statues present the park visitor with an array of props to arrange as they see fit and they also present the webcam viewers with a changing scene of Coshocton, which includes live actors among the photographically represented.

This public art project concept by Amy Youngs was created in collaboration with the Coshocton Opportunity High School students and Anne Cornell at the Pomerene Center for the Arts.

For 6 years, I collected images from webcams pointed at landscapes around the world.  Initially, my interest was in the extended vision these cameras provided, but my focus shifted to the mistakes, artifacts, and faults with the camera systems, rather than the outdoor scene meant to be displayed to internet viewers. Interesting artifacts are revealed as the camera struggles to image a scene that includes the bright afternoon sun, or reflections on the window it points out of, or electrical interference. The resulting landscapes include sublime pixel streaks, soft-focus abstractions, mirror images of the camera, light flares, and other mysterious effects. I categorized thousands of my screencaptured images into 8 types of artifacts. This installation includes “Glitches”, “Blurs” and “Internal Reflections”, each printed on a separate panel.

The sky images are printed out as a ten-foot long panorama, with those taken at noon placed at the top and those taken at midnight inverted and placed at the bottom.