electronic botany

New work

2009-09-13T10:47:00.000-07:00

the crystal palace

2009-08-03T12:16:00.000-07:00

Queen Victoria's description: The tremendous cheers, the joy expressed in every face, the immensity of the building, the mixture of palms, flowers, trees, statues, fountains; the organ (with two hundred instruments and six hundred voices, which sounded like nothing). . . .

one truth about grammar

2009-07-17T15:29:00.001-07:00

it includes organic material

I wish

2009-07-16T22:25:00.000-07:00

I could make an installation that smelled like tomato plants.

here's a view of the studio window and how the tomatoes have taken over the scene. so my view or interpretation of outside is seen through tomatoes.

Trudy again

2009-07-04T10:54:00.001-07:00

Garden sport

2009-07-02T13:31:00.001-07:00

I have fashioned an object to hold my melon off the ground with used sports equipment. I am using an upside down cone and an old basketball net tied together with twist-ties.

horticultural and organic cacophony

2009-06-28T20:45:00.000-07:00

every spring I think that this is the year that my garden will be more organized. we take walks throughout town and I look at gardens that seem straight out of Beatrix Potter--rows of plump cabbages, barrels of shiny strawberry plants, twisted minimalist and pollarded apple trees. I think this is what I want but then the queen anne's lace shows up next to the kale and the arugula goes to seed around the blueberries and I am incapable of ending such incredibly varied and curious states of being for the purpose of imposing order. don't get me wrong, I definitely weed and plant starts and scatter seeds and move seedlings. I felt vindicated this spring when the NYTimes had an article about how one should encourage native species (weeds some might call them) in your garden in order to better attract pollinators. it got me thinking that gardening philosophies have been totally outdated, today when such a large percentage of the globe has human order or impact imposed upon it, what we need to be cultivating are actually these spaces of harmonious disorder. so this is what I am doing. think of it like the Chicago Art Ensemble for horticulture.

this is a strong connection between our work I think, what you call the organized disorder (is that what you called it? no wait, maybe you said disorganization in space. I said disorder). also as I commented below, the post apocalyptic aesthetic of handmade garden props and constructions. this is totally off-topic but it reminds me of a guy we saw in Berlin who was walking down the street with a hand truck he had fabricated out of a skateboard sawed in half and an old cane. and lots of duct tape and twine.

Trudy: The Movie

2009-06-28T20:37:00.000-07:00

like some underwater creature it is......The Corpse Flower Awakens

Infiltrating the system of botany

2009-06-28T16:03:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I am going for an interview at a large scale nursery named land tech enterprises. Trying to learn/infiltrate the system of botany. Does this company sound like some kind of front to you? It sounds like some kind of underground/secretive way of creating land masses or something. Can't quite put my finger on it. I imagine a large gated entrance where I have to present some form of identification. Upon clearance, I may enter this compound of greenhouses in which they use experimental methods to create new hybrid plants. That is what Land Tech Enterprises sounds like to me. We will see, perhaps I will sneak a camera in to my interview and photograph the "goings-on."

The Process of Electrifying

2009-06-27T13:43:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking about what Electronic Botany means to me. I'm still not sure, but there is something here. Growing ideas. By practicing e-botany, the propagation of ideas can be made more clear and may increase offspring by vast numerical amounts. I'm still pondering.

Images from the garden and studio

2009-06-27T13:06:00.001-07:00

I have found that the way I create art in the studio is very similar to the way I keep a garden. If you notice in the following pictures, and I haven't noticed until just now...but in every image here you can see hanging ropes and viney-like structures attaching to different objects that I have arranged in the studio. These are very similar to the tendrils of plants. They grab on to anything and everything. Also, the organization. Or to some, the disorganization of objects in a space is parallel to the way I keep a garden.

While from afar, it may appear to be a large, overgrown mass of vegetation, but a closer look shows many surprises.

Cacti Grafting Station

2009-06-27T12:24:00.000-07:00

I have been experimenting with ways to keep the rain off of my cacti, but still get sun. Money is tight, so objects from around the house are being implemented. You will also see the slow construction of my miniature geodesic dome structure.

Forest Foray

2009-06-27T12:20:00.001-07:00

Here I am in the woods trying to remember where I found those mysterious mushrooms. Those yellow mushrooms I found as a child. Where are they now? Have the migrated? Am I not in season? I am trying to recall those memories. I cannot remember, however. So, I look and I look. Somewhere they must be!

Innoculation

2009-06-27T12:11:00.001-07:00

These images are of spores dropped from mushroom caps onto ARTFORUM magazine. I am introducing spores from garden mushrooms into this magazine, and using it as a culture medium. The magazines will be buried in beds and left to grow.

Grafting Cactus

2009-06-27T11:53:00.000-07:00

I have once visited the stacking of spray paint caps in the creation of Onomatopoeia Machine.

I am now revisiting the stacking forms for cacti grafts.
This is an image of my thoughts on how the process will go.
I am drawn to both the idea of forcing two species together and using color, as well as form to create a piece that can continually evolve and change. To keep evolving is important. Often works of art seize to do this. They are photographed and archived to be sealed and delivered, always as they were, the same. to never change, to never grow, to always be pristine and frozen in time. I have trouble creating something and leaving it be. However with plants, they can grow and reproduce and die. They can perform.

I have also started to introduce Prickly Pear Cacti to the wild of Pennsylvania. The picture above is from North Carolina 2008. I harvested a couple if these cacti and I am now undergoing the transplantation of cacti to PA soil. Time will tell if they can survive.

equestrian ballet is always relevant

2009-06-26T21:52:00.000-07:00

It's 1677 and Francesco Sbarra is writing of a Viennese equestrian ballet:"The simultaneous harmony and confusion producing a remarkable spectacle." (quoted in "Equestrian Ballets of the Baroque Period," The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 19 No. 1.)

I remember my complete and utter bewilderment the first time I went to a circus, realizing
1. there was more than one ring and
2. different things were happening in each ring.

So you mean I could go to the circus and not see something? Quickly quickly the light changes. How do you ever know where to look? I think about this a lot.

Light and Position should not be taken for granted/normalized/assumed. Nor can a Path be assumed. The sunflowers will shift, a hummingbird may exit the scene, and what is the relevant cycle of artificial light for artificial situations? Everything together all right.

Now I am imagining an artcosystem say the size of an airplane hanger or an abandoned Walmart SuperStore. Situations abound, as do scissor lifts. Inside outside gardens artifices. There will be ushers and usherettes to guide visitors into the lifts, and then picture the viewers, motorized swooping gently up through the canopy layer and down into subterranean mazes. Everywhere there is movement--of the viewers in their lifts, of bees in the mint, of illuminations on and off, of dynamo-powered rainbows and teeter-totter compositions.

Okay for starters Tom and I are going to build an elevator that will creaky crank you down and up through a tunnel of constructions and plants.

an aesthetic of care

2009-06-26T20:17:00.000-07:00

I have written in my sketchbook that the Russian poet Alexander Vvendsky's poem Rug/Hydrangea contains the line "I don't like the fact that I'm mortal." The swinging states of the garden and the studio--- in fact even the back-and-forth between these two arenas, walking, cleaning, shifting tools---are a way for me to attempt to comprehend something of this corporeality. The plants or the materials are there and they shift and they change and they eventually disintegrate. And me, I am responsible for what I think of as an aesthetic of care. Everything seems to be an entity of some sort. Everything seems ambiguous. And everything feels its weight. Sometime I find things so beautiful that it is almost hard to look at them, and I am only forced into confrontation with this beauty by the reluctant knowledge of its vulnerability and ephemeralness.

Paying attention to the muteness of things. Also to the way that nothing can be assumed. Like this year, a host of radishes showed up in the garden, thanks to some passing birds perhaps? Or maybe the swishing tail of that back alley cat. The garden, like the studio, ends up a tangle of trajectories. Collards, dahlias, fennel, mint, feverfew, potatoes, poppies, hollyhocks, and mustard greens. A plaster H, some chickenwire clots, orange squiggles, silvered three-demensional polka dots, the word OH made out of painted canvas. I have to see them all together.

monster plant structure: the Corpse Flower

2009-06-25T23:45:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine has been making a time-lapse video of this down in Berkeley, and she's promised to send me the footage. In the meantime, look at the square cutout! Look at the pollen-catching tinfoil! Look at Trudy!

The blooming of Trudy.

garden confetti or, how humans interact with plants

2009-06-25T22:50:00.000-07:00

John,
I've been searching about so that I could photograph this postcard that Tom and I found in our mailbox a few years ago. We hadn't gotten any mail for awhile (which can tend to happen in our neighborhood so we weren't entirely surprised) and then we found this card, it was simply an advertisement for something but the mailman had scrawled on it somewhat frantically:

"too many bees in the yard.
risk of being stung is high.
your postman."

I really should have realized the blurry binding between my studio and garden practices a long long time ago, 7 years? It was when I used black electrical tape to repair rain damage on an overly exuberant lupine plant. I was very worried about the life of the lupine and all I had on hand was the electrical tape (oh and a used, slightly purple popsicle stick for a splint)--miraculously the lupine survived and bloomed and actually looked rather post-industrial jaunty with its black plastic bandage and weirdly angularized branch.

Right now I am getting into the source of the whole pastoral/bucolic tradition--Theocritus. Amazing poems, and saturated with agriculture and the natural world, but so far not so much that directly refers to the tending and care of plants. More about the herdsman life. Although now that I think about it, I kind of like the idea of herding rather than cultivating plants. And also materials. Temporary is as.

The background blog image is of one of my moss rafts this spring. I was happy that the falling cherry blossoms rode into the studio on the raft. Garden confetti.

So I need to know more details about cacti in the Pennsylvania woods.