Author Archives: jharrower

CHRIS WOEBKEN and KENICHI OKADA

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Animal Superpowers, 2008
Animal Superpowers is a collection of wearables designed to help humans experience life from an ant’s, bird’s, or giraffe’s view. The ant wearable is best experienced by crawling on the ground. Two cameras attached to the hands send images to a display worn on your head. As you move around on all fours, you see the world from a low camera angle, close to the ground. The video image is also significantly scaled up, making small objects appear very large. Blades of grass become arboreal. The giraffe wearable adds height by mounting a periscope extension to the top of a your head. The device also lowers your voice’s pitch to match your increased size. And the bird wearable guides you along a path with feedback provided by a vibrating headband. Just as birds sense geomagnetic fields to help them migrate, your headband’s vibrations tell you which way to turn to find your way home.

Animal SuperPowers, Wearables
Animal SuperPowers, Ant Wearable

See Woebken’s website.

EDWARD BURTYNSKY

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Burtynsky photographs landscapes that highlight the scale of human industry and consumption.

“My work does become a kind of lament....We can't have our cities, we can't have our cars, we can't have our jets without creating wastelands. For every act of creation there is an act of destruction. Take the skyscrapper—there is an equivalent void in nature: quarries, mines."1

See Burtynsky's website.

1Diane Ackerman, The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2014), 24.

DAVID BOWEN

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Bowen creates interactive sculptures that include inputs from clouds, wind, water, and insects.

Fly Blimps, 2014
House flies float in passenger compartments attached to helium-filled balloons. The compartments provide food, water, and light to sustain the insect aviators. Fly activity directs the movement of the balloons — “the flies are essentially the brain of each of the devices, determining how they interact and respond to the space as well as the other devices.”1

Cloud Piano, 2014
A piano plays music based on the movement and shape of clouds: a camera records the clouds, software interprets the cloud patterns, and robotic actuators press the piano’s key.

Cloud Piano

See Bowen’s website.

1 David Bowen, Fly Blimps

ANNEMARIE MAES

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Maes amplifies our sense of the environment by integrating human structures with natural systems.

Urban Corridors, 2011
To track the flight patterns and health of bee colonies, Maes installs sensors in a cluster of city gardens. The gardens not only record animal behavior but also create an urban green corridor that benefits bees and other animals.

Urban Corridors

“Ecological corridors rely partly on methods of urban agriculture, guerilla gardening, ecological management and social anthropology. Corridors can also make good use of avant-garde technologies, so that such projects become experiments on the edges of art, science and technology: embedded systems, novel sensors, low energy computing and sensor networks are useful for monitoring soil quality, plant growth processes, animal activity, pollution and the movement and interaction of people within the local environment.”1

The Peephole, Dancing Bees, 2014
Viewers look through a peephole to watch sped up imagery of a bee colony. The footage records ten months of the colony’s day-to-day interactions.

Peephole

Invisible Garden, 2014
Maes builds a garden inside an old textile factory. The garden has four zones: “the naturalistic mediterranean garden, with olive trees and grasses; the edible forest garden, with bee-friendly trees, shrubs and ground cover; the vegetable garden with perennial and annual plants; and the herb garden with medicinal plants designed to support the health of bees.”

Maes aims to create a garden that appeals to humans and bees. She combines different plant species to support a complex, indoor ecosystem. She also distributes “poetic memories” throughout the garden — monitors play images and sounds inspired by natural structures.

Invisible Garden

See Maes’ website.

1 AnneMarie Maes, annemariemaes.net/projects/the-urban-corridors-project/

HENRIQUE OLIVEIRA

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Oliveira builds sculptures and installations that combine human-made materials with biomorphic forms. His work often challenges the clean-lined, concrete boxes of modernist architecture — Oliveira’s arboreal mutants crash through museum walls and spill on to gallery floors.

Henrique Oliveira
Henrique Oliveira

See Oliveira’s website.

DAMIEN HIRST

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Hirst employs the bodies of animals in aestheticized, natural-history museum-esque installations. In the ’90s, he installations featured the carcasses of wild and domesticated animals in large tanks of formaldehyde. He also created paintings and sculptures with the remains of insects and arachnids.

The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991
The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living

The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths, 2006
The True Artists Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths

Judecca, 2012
Judecca

See Hirst’s website.