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. 

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.

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.

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.

The footage was sourced from a wide array of live webcams pointed at animals on farms, wildlife preserves, and private homes, which I collected over the span of a year and compiled into continuously streaming loops. The installation draws inspiration from John Berger’s essay “Why Look at Animals?”, in which he reflects on the shifting dynamics of human-animal relationships since the 19th century. Berger observes the dissolution of “every tradition which has previously mediated between man and nature.”

In response, my work explores a contemporary form of mediation—one that did not exist when Berger wrote in 1980. Today, we orient our webcams towards animals and use our internet browsers to watch them. Perhaps we do so because they offer a spectacle. Or perhaps it is because animals continue to matter to us, and we seek to remain connected to them—even in their absence.

Viewers interact with the work through two live video feeds, which intermingle with videos captured from the natural and urban body of central Ohio. These elements are mixed into a dynamic structure that visualizes the interconnections between the natural and technological aspects of our urban landscape, playing at many scales, and creating the sense of a non-hierarchical, ever-changing whole.

This project was a commission from COSI (Columbus Museum of Science and Industry) for their permanent collection.

Special thanks to curator Sarah Rogers and to COSI for supporting this work.

The human plays an important part at the table by eating, feeding the food waste to the worms, feeding the resulting fertilizer to the plants, or by simply sitting and appreciating the living ecosystem she/he is a part of. A cross-section of the activity inside the top 9 inches of the compost is made visible using an infrared security camera connected to an LCD screen built into the table. On the screen, viewers can see the live movements of the worms and sowbugs inside.

Technical info

Vermicomposting – The hand-made composting bag is based on a “flow-through” vermicomposting system, designed to make harvesting the worm castings much easier. Standard methods involve separating worms by hand, or by lifting heavy sections of the stacking tray type of bin. I use several types of bins at home, including the homemade plastic tub type and the fancy, stacking tray type, but I am most excited about the ease of use of this new bag type. To construct my own vermicomposting bag, I’ve sewn together 2 layers of landscape fabric, rather than use plastic, in order to increase the air circulation around the sides, but the top is closed off, to keep more moisture up there. The worms like the moisture level to be around 75 – 85%. To harvest the “black gold” castings, I simply untie the string at the bottom of the bag and squeeze it a bit to allow the finished castings to fall out. Very few worms remain at the bottom of the bag where the finished castings are, because the food is at the top of the bag and the material gets a bit drier at the base, so the worms don’t like it. If you’d like to build a your own basic flow-through worm bag, I’ve made an Instructable for you here.

Seeing worms – is more difficult than you might imagine, since worms are harmed by white light. They do not mind infra-red, but humans cannot see in that frequency. Video cameras are sensitive to that frequency, but often have filters to remove it. The video camera used in this project is a very low light, black and white security camera (.0003 lux, 600 lines of resolution, Sony Super HAD CCD). It is showing the worms and sowbugs live, using infra-red light that filters in from the theater gels located beneath the feeding portal (because it turns out the white polyethylene lets a little light in) and on the side of the bag where a clear acrylic dome cuts into the fabric for the camera to image the action inside the composting material. The filters that allow only infra-red to pass are Rosco #27 and #382, discussed in detail here. The camera is connected to a 10″ LCD screen, which was removed from a $200 snail-shaped TV for kids made by Hannspree.

Wood and stain – The wood is FSC (Forest Stewardship Council Certified) oak plywood, which I actually purchased at Lowes. They have a policy to “agressively phase out the purchase of wood products from endangered forests”. In an effort to be ecological – and to reference the cycle of food reprocessing – I decided to stain the wood with a homemade concoction of boiled red cabbage, mixed with a little worm compost tea (leachate from pure worm castings) and alum. This stain is beautifully purple at first, but after a few days the color fades quite a lot, even after 2 coats of polyurethane…

Inspirations

Dr. Clive Edwards and Norman Aroncon, soil ecology researchers at the Ohio State University who graciously showed me their vermicomposting research and answered my many questions. Their recent research paper is, Effects of Vermicompost Tea on Plant Growth and Disease.

The Earth Moved: On the Remarkable Achievements of Earthworms – a book by Amy Stewart.

Soil Factory, by N55, eco concept art/design collective in Copenhagen, Denmark.

MASSIVE CHANGE, Bruce Mau Design and the Institute Without Boundaries

This piece was made possible through the generous grant of an artist residency at Pilchuck Glass School. Special thanks to Michael Scheiner and Joe Cariatti the superstar glass blowing gaffers. Thanks also to Kami Westhoff and Simon Maberley for their expert advice and assistance in glass blowing, casting and cold working. And a special thanks to the Director Ruth King.