JENNIFER PARKER

Posted on August 25, 2023August 25, 2023 by parker1

Parker is a Professor and founding Director of the OpenLab Collaborative Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

As a media artist, Parker is recognized for her innovative work investigating issues of biology and technology, combining art, ecology, and design. Through multi-sensory and interdisciplinary collaborations, she engages scientific and creative practices to explore the sensorial world of humans and the more than-human world of species living on the planet.

As an educator, Parker carves sites for collective engagement between disciplines. Facilitating, identifying, and determining the boundaries of complex, multi-dimensional space to develop (a sense of) community to encourage learning and inform and develop the practice of its members. Her methods of inquiry build on lab and studio visits, literature reviews, and conversations with faculty and students across disciplines, triggering a heuristic learning process to pursue creative research for exhibitions and publications.

Jennifer Parker’s website: https://www.jenniferparker.net

JUNIPER HARROWER

Posted on November 18, 2017November 18, 2017 by jharrower

Harrower is both a research ecologist and artist, and uses fibers and oils from her study organisms to manipulate the physical properties of her paints and tell the story of climate change and species loss. In her series Fungal Soil Mutualisms, she explores how the changing climate may alter symbiotic interactions between soil fungi and Joshua trees and how that could impact tree survival.

See Juniper’s website.

BARTHOLOMÄUS TRAUBECK

Posted on March 11, 2016November 18, 2017 by jharrower

Years, 2011, Galerie Lisa Ruyter Vienna, Photo: Andreas Fleckl

Bartholomäus Traubeck builds equipment to translate the information contained in tree rings into music.

Years, 2011

Tree rings can provide information regarding the age of a tree, as well as different environmental conditions that the tree experienced throughout its life time. This can allow researchers to understand ecological conditions such as droughts, floods, temperature extremes, fires and disease. Traubeck’s equipment translates the rings on a turntable, using sensors rather than a needle, that gathers information about the wood’s color, patterns, and texture, and uses an algorithm to translate that into piano music.

See Traubeck’s website

ANNEA LOCKWOOD

Posted on May 19, 2015May 20, 2015 by jharrower

Annea Lockwood captures the music of our planet. She creates compositions that weave together the sounds of humans, animals, plants, and a variety of inanimate but dynamic objects including water, glass, magna, and tectonic plates.

Wild Energy, 2014
Working with Bob Bielecki, Lockwood makes audible the vibrations that emanate from the sun, earth, plants, and animals. Lockwood’s soundscape combines the rhythms of the sun’s pressures waves, fissures in the earth’s crust, shifts in tectonic plates, the electromagnetic field, whale songs, bat echolocation, and the capillary action of trees. The artists state: “It is our sense that through these sounds one can feel the energies generated, not as concepts but as energy-fields moving through one’s body.” ¹

The sounds enliven an outdoor installation set in a forest clearing furnished with hammocks that encourage relaxed and attentive listening.

WOLFGANG LAIB

Posted on April 28, 2015May 19, 2015 by jharrower

Laib combines ephemeral materials—pollen, beeswax, milk, and rice—with long-lasting materials like stone, brass, and wood to create minimalist sculptures and installations. His refined shapes, warm colors, and aromatic materials invite us to slow down and contemplate the sensory richness of the world.

Milkstones
Laib carves a slight indentation in the top of a polished white marble brick and fills that indentation with milk. The milk creates a seamless skin on the top the marble—the ephemeral and permanent perfectly joined. Laib states, “how temporary milk is and how eternal a stone is.”¹

Pollen Sculptures
Laib painstakingly collects pollen from the wildflowers and trees close to his home in Germany. He then carefully sifts the pollen on to a museum or gallery floor to create simple geometric shapes. Laib states, “pollen is the potential beginning of the life of the plant. It is as simple, as beautiful, and as complex as this.”²

¹ART21: Wolgang Laib
²MOMA’s Wolfgang Laib exhibit

MEL CHIN

Posted on April 28, 2015April 29, 2015 by jharrower

Chin works as an artist and community activist. His collaborative projects combine pragmatic solutions to real-world problems with aesthetic and conceptual experiments.

Revival Field, 1991
Chin took inspiration from botanist Rufus Chaney’s research on hyperaccumulator plants—plants that pull heavy metals from the soil. For Revival Field, Chin planted hyperaccumaltors at Pig’s Eye Landfill, a contaminated Superfund site in St. Paul, MN. The project was conceived as a scientific experiment that asked: Can plants remove soil toxins? It was also an eco-art sculpture that highlighted the potential to remedy polluted environments.¹

Operation Paydirt, 2006-Present
After hurricane Katrina stuck New Orleans, Chin decided he could help the city recover by focusing his attention on the high levels of lead in the city’s older neighborhoods. Before the hurricane hit, thirty to fifty percent of the neighborhoods’ children suffered from lead poisoning. Lead poisoning affects brain development, damages the nervous system and kidneys, and leads to behavioral problems.² When Chin discovered that remediation of the soil in New Orleans would cost $300 million, he created Fundred—an art project that encourages children and their families to create art works in the shape of hundred dollar bills. Chin collects the Fundreds and plans to present them to Congress as a symbolic gesture that raises awareness of lead contamination and asks the government to appropriate funds to remedy the problem. Chin sees the New Orleans project as the first step in a bigger project that aims to remediate contaminated soil in cities across the U.S.³

See Mel Chin’s website.

¹“Mel Chin in Conversation with Fareed Armaly and Ute Meta Bauer,” in Nature, ed. Jeffrey Kastner, (London, UK: Whitechapel Gallery Ventures Limited, 2012), 174-176.
²Operation Paydirt: About.
³Linda Weintraub, To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet, “Mel Chin: Soil Remediation,” (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 135-140.