Photos by Wong Pak Hang.

The exhibition team installed the work beautifully; including the virtual reality experience zone next to the live springtail terrariums with magnifiers and a video microscope viewing area. The exhibition is at Hong Kong City Hall, November 4 – November 12, 2023. I will also present a talk titled, Eco Intelligence, in the festival’s conference, Humans, Animals, Plants, Machines and Artificial Intelligence, on Nov 9, 2023.

Belonging to Soil is a collaborative virtual reality artwork created with Shadrick Addy, Mayen McClain, Luke Stephens, JT Thrash, Andrew Sanchez, Josh Rodenberg, Megan Wright, and William Yuan.

The public can visit the gallery at 1740 Broadway St. Tuesday through Friday from 11AM to 5PM, and Saturdays from 1PM to 5PM. August 6 – September 14, 2021. Or listen to our interview together.

In Tiahue Tocha (let’s go home) Colectivo Rasquache continues its project of engaging with transborder reality through material and social invention, this time with particular attention to brickmaking as a homage and timeline of Coapan. As construction methods in Mexico have evolved, brick-making, which, along with farming, was the primary occupation of many from Coapan who have since migrated to the US, gave way to cement block. Cement blocks are not made from local materials unlike red bricks or adobe bricks. For our installation at Visible Records, the red clay of Virginia provides fresh material for old ways of making as we ask:

• What new things are built when we are apart?  
• What opportunities arise out of absence or restriction? 
• What possibilities might make themselves known that otherwise would never have been?
• How do we share them?
• What happens when nostalgia gives way to futurity?

The workshop I did with Ken Rinaldo was called “Unmaking with Worms”. Participants built mini sculptures and placed them into a baby bassinet where composting worms live. Our building materials were food and paper waste; egg cartons and discarded vegetables sourced from the compost pile of a nearby community garden. During the workshop, we explored how worm ecosystems “unmake” waste matter and “remake” it into fertile compost.

During the run of the exhibition, a time-lapse camera is capturing the transformation of the sculptures. Looking forward to seeing the worms work!

What does it mean to have an ecoconsciousness? The works here offer multiple answers to that question. ecoconsciousness measures our interconnectivity with the natural world. It celebrates our links to the animals with whom we share the planet, to the trees, fruits, vegetables, herbs and insects that make life possible, to the land and waters that bear witness to our best and worst impulses and to the ecological systems that sustain us all. It encompasses our awareness both of the beauty of nature and the devastating horrors created by our efforts to exploit it. It manifests itself in artworks that bring the perilous consequences of our actions to our attention through striking images, immersive installations, evocative performances and rituals and practical proposals. It engages with fields as diverse as science, technology, poetry, politics, history, anthropology, art history and futurism. And it poses questions about our place in the cosmos with wit, sorrow, anger and hope.

Eleanor Heartney, Juror

The ecoconsciousness catalogue can be viewed on ecoartspace’s website. Print versions can be ordered there.

Can we break away from current agricultural practices which are intimately connected to desertification, water and soil pollution, antibiotic resistance, climate change and social and economic inequalities? In a two-hour discussion we are interested in considering a sustainable, multispecies perspective to farming, which could start in the soil and progress through thinking about the multiple ways we can consider food. Aquaponics, vertical farming, worms, soldier flies, and permaculture offer real solutions, where food is grown while respecting living beings, and the intertwined ecologies that support them.Humane food can be grown in urban or rural communities, though the soil is critical. How can we learn and care about living beings we cannot quickly know or see? What is care like in practice? We are also interested in exploring the concept of “citizen eco-artist” as so much of what we do resides in the spaces between actual science, sustainable practice and speculative fiction.

• This international talk with be livestreamed on youtube and recorded for later viewing.
  
• A coproduction of the Network for Prototyping the Future and Art Laboratory Berlin

The artists in the show are:

Suzanne Anker
Ruth K. Burke
Katie Caron Adrienne DeLoe
Anna Dumitriu
Ana Maria Hernando
Luke Jerram
Ken Rinaldo
Regan Rosberg
Jennifer Delilah Trammell
Amy M. Youngs

Go visit it online.

In his podcast, Voices of Excellence, he asked me many great questions about my art and teaching practices. You’ll hear me talking about my recent work with virtual reality, augmented reality and about how living with worms has influenced me. We also discuss interdisciplinary teaching, creativity, eco art, bio art, art & science and art & technology.

My interview is on Soundcloud and on Apple iTunes.

And you can listen to all of the Voices of Excellence interviews on this regular podcast on Soundcloud or iTunes. They focus on the innovative work being done by faculty and staff in the College of Arts and Sciences at the Ohio State University.

There are 8 scenes which place at Willow Lake, on the South end of Flushing Meadows Corona Park, in New York. 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. The tour takes about 26 minutes and the one-way walk down the trail is less than a mile. You can also use the app in your local park, GPS is not required.

This artwork is a guided tour which allows us to inhabit the worlds of multiple species along an urban park trail, 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 Queens, NY.

Thank you to collaborators Josh Rodenberg, Danielle McPhatter, and Jayne Kennedy. And project supporters Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center, NY, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, and the New York Urban Field Station, a partnership between NYC Parks, the US Forest Service, and the Natural Areas Conservancy, NY.

• More info about the site, process, and people involved in this artwork here.
• My research bibliography is here. 
• Opening events to celebrate the app are announced here.

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

We are creating Machine Garden, a system sculpture in which plants, worms, microbes, and machines will coexist in a state of symbiotic intertwining. Food waste will be transformed into fertilizer in a worm hive composter, which provides connections to the plants via a highway of interconnected tubes that allow worm migration throughout.

We are building this work as 2017 Researchers-in-residence at the innovative Media, Research and Commercialization Center. This is an incredible facility outfitted with a variety of tools and equipment, including a full shop, 3D printers and 3D scanner, computer-controlled machine tools, a cutting and engraving laser, plastic vacuum former, large format printers, a range of design and production software, electronics workbenches, video and still cameras, audio recording and mixing equipment, and a variety of tools for supporting interactive environments and installations.