Here’s something for the evening of Thursday 27 April 7-10 pm.
Designer and trouble-maker Leila Johnston has invited me to join Katharine Vega (chroma.space) and Dr Sean Power (Trinity College, Dublin) at the Site Gallery in Sheffield to ask whether art, science and belief are “branches of the same tree” as Albert Einstein once said, and what happens when some of those branches begin to crack?
Previewing an exhibition of photographs by Richard Mosse for New Scientist, 11 February 2017
Irish photographer Richard Mosse has come up with a novel way to inspire compassion for refugees. He presents them as drones might see them – as detailed heat maps, often shorn of expression, skin tone, and even clues to age and sex. Mosse’s subjects, captured in the Middle East, North Africa and Europe, don’t look back at us: the infrared camera renders their eyes as uniform black spaces.
Mosse has made a career out of repurposing photographic kit meant for military use. The images here show his subjects as seen, mostly at night, by a super-telephoto device designed for border and battlefield surveillance. Able to zoom in from 6 kilometres away, the camera anonymises them, making them strangely faceless even while their sweat, breath and sometimes blood circulation patterns are visible.
The results are almost closer to the nightmarish paintings of Hieronymus Bosch than the work of a documentary photographer. Making sense of them requires imagination and empathy: after all, this is how a smart weapon might see us.
Mosse came across his heat-mapping camera via a friend who worked on the BBC series Planet Earth. Legally classified as an advanced weapons system, the device is unwieldy and – with no user interface or handbook – difficult to use. But, working with cinematographer Trevor Tweeten, Mosse has managed to use it to make a 52-minute video. Incoming will wrap itself around visitors to the Curve Gallery at the Barbican arts centre in London from 15 February until 23 April.
For New Scientist, 1 February 2017
In a small, windowless corner of the University of Dundee, UK, Caroline Erolin of the Centre for Anatomy & Human Identification is ironing a fossilised pterodactyl.
At least, that’s what she appears to be doing. In fact, Erolin’s “iron” is a handheld 3D scanner, and her digitised animals are now being used as teaching aids worldwide. Her enthusiasm for the work (which she has to squeeze between research into medical visualisation and haptics) is palpable. She is not just bringing animals back from the dead, but helping to bring a great collection back to life.
In 1884, the biologist and classicist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson began assembling a teaching and research museum in Dundee. An energetic philanthropist and a natural diplomat, Thompson had a broad network of friends and contacts – among them members of Dundee’s own whaling community, who provided him with extraordinary, then-unique specimens of Arctic fauna.
In 1956, the building that housed the University of Dundee’s natural history department was scheduled for demolition and Thompson’s collection, created as part of his work there, was dispersed. Scholars have been scrambling to recover its treasures ever since. Asked whether it can in fact be reassembled, Erolin laughs and gestures at the confines in which the surviving items are (rather artfully) squeezed. “It’s a question of space. We’re already sitting on an entire elephant skeleton. Where on earth would we put that?”
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It’s largely not a genuine problem though, in part because advances in digitisation are changing the priorities of collections worldwide. Even more importantly, it is generally acknowledged that Thompson has outgrown Dundee: he belongs to the world. Together with Charles Darwin, Thompson, who died in 1948, is the most culturally influential English-speaking biologist in history.
We have one book to thank for that: On Growth and Form, first published in 1917 – an event commemorated by an exhibition, A Sketch of the Universe: Art, science and the influence of D’Arcy Thompson, at the Edinburgh City Art Centre.
“Thompson described his landmark book as all preface”
In neither the first edition nor the revised and expanded 1942 version does Thompson talk much about Darwin, and even in the 1940s he considered genetics hardly more than a distraction. Thompson was pursuing an entirely different line: the way in which physical constraints and the initial conditions of life shape the development of plants and animals.
Thompson was fascinated by tiny, single-celled shelled organisms such as foraminifera and radiolaria. He was convinced (rightly) that their wildly diverse shell shapes play no evolutionary role: they arise at random, their beauty emerging from the self-organising properties of matter, not from any biological code.
Even as geneticists like Ernst Mayr and Theodosius Dobzhansky were revealing the genetic mechanisms that constrain how living things evolve, Thompson was revealing the constraints and opportunities afforded to living things by physics and chemistry. Crudely put, genetics explains why dogs, say, look like other dogs. Thompson did something different: he glimpsed why dogs look the way they do.
Most of Thompson’s contemporaries were caught up in a genetic revolution, synthesising the seemingly incompatible demands of chromosomal genetics and Darwinian selection theory. No one ever seriously doubted Thompson’s importance – his book has always been a classic text – but at the same time, few have ever quite known what to do with him.
Portrait of D'Arcy Thompson by Darren McFarlane
Darren McFarlane, Scarus, Pomacanthus, 2012, oil on canvas. (University of Dundee Museum Services © the artist)
Thompson himself (pictured above as morphed by artist Darren McFarlane) understood the problem; he described his landmark book as “all preface”: the sketch of a territory he lacked the mathematical skill to penetrate. What the arguments in On Growth and Form really needed is a computer, and a big one at that (which makes Thompson a character who might have dropped straight out of the pages of Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia).
Artists, on the other hand, from Henry Moore to Richard Hamilton to Eduardo Paolozzi, knew exactly what to do – and the Edinburgh exhibition combines the University of Dundee’s own collection of biomorphic, Thompsonesque art with new commissions. Several stand-out pieces are by artists who were students at Dundee’s own Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design.
To its credit, Thompson’s alma mater has not been slow to exploit the way his meticulous and beautiful work straddles art and science: it supports a dedicated art-science crossover gallery called LifeSpace, as well as offering degrees in animation, medical art and medical imaging, connecting digital processes with traditional illustration. They are making the most of On Growth and Form‘s centenary, but the influence of Thompson on the university is deep and abiding.
That is as well. For all our anxious predictions about genetic engineering, for all the hype surrounding synthetic biology, and all the many hundreds of graduate design shows stuffed with “imaginary animals”, we have barely begun to explore let alone exploit the spaces Thompson’s vision revealed to us.
Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2120057-darcy-wentworth-thompson-the-man-who-shaped-biology-and-art/#ixzz63gNDj1gc
for New Scientist, 21 November 2016
Artist Nick Laessing has been learning more than is entirely healthy about the internal workings of motor vehicles. He has been spurred on by the myths surrounding water-powered cars, a notion first cooked up in Dallas in 1935 that has powered conspiracy theories and investment frauds ever since.
Laessing insists I climb in among the boxes and dials that half-fill the front passenger seat of his humble VW Golf. We’re in Liverpool, where his Water Gas Car is being exhibited in No Such Thing as Gravity, an art show that curator Rob La Frenais says reveals the shape of science by mapping “where the relation between data and knowledge is uncertain”.
There’s mischief here: Agnes Meyer-Brandis’s 2010 video Studies in Applied Falling makes a seamless and hard-to-spot nonsense of astronaut David Scott’s famous experiment, in which he dropped a hammer and a feather together in the airless environment of the moon.
Nevertheless, La Frenais, who used to curate for the London-based art-science organisation Arts Catalyst, is adamant that his show is not about pseudoscience: “It is about those areas where science is still a developing body of knowledge,” he explains. “It lets people ask naive questions about science and not feel embarrassed.”
Science for the future?
Laessing’s car is a case in point. No one, however well-informed, really knows whether water-gas cars have a future. Laessing’s on-board technology isn’t going to set the markets alight, but it does work, harvesting hydrogen fuel from water through solar-powered electrolysis.
Tania Candiani’s lovingly recreated 17th-century flying machine also works – up to a point. At least, she has ridden it through the hull of a jumbo jet in free fall, and lived to film the tale. What was, centuries ago, a serious technical effort becomes, in light of subsequent knowledge, a touching and amusing entertainment.
Nearby, an installation called Heirloom stands this formula on its head. Artist Gina Czarnecki and John Hunt at the University of Liverpool’s Institute of Ageing and Chronic Disease have produced an extraordinary living artwork that promises one day to become a useful technology.
Living portraits of Gina’s two daughters are being grown on glass casts from cells collected from inside their mouths. Over time, the cells will grow to the thickness of tissue paper. The surgical possibilities for custom-shaped grafts are considerable, if still far off. A correctly curved graft means a more natural fit for the client, with less scarring and less disfigurement.
Meanwhile, as we wait for the technology to improve, Czarnecki’s haunting portraits raise natural (though perhaps too obvious) questions about biological ownership and identity.
Artful answers
Sometimes, scientific advances throw up questions that only art can answer. Two artists in the show explore near-death experiences. Sarah Sparkes is interested in the psychology of the phenomenon, recreating a classic experiment in generating uncanny sensations. Push a lever, and a rod pokes you in the back. Fair enough. Now push the lever again, and the rod pokes you in the back a split-second later. An irresistible suspicion arises that you are communicating with a hidden presence.
Helen Pynor, by contrast, explores the way in which advances in resuscitation medicine have increased the frequency of near-death experiences. This has led her to make artworks that challenge the tricky notion of a “moment of death”.
Two pig hearts from an abattoir, kept alive by an artificially maintained flow of oxygenated blood, dominated her 2013 installation The Body is a Big Place. Her work displayed at FACT, The End is a Distant Memory, was inspired by a casual conversation with regeneration biologist Jochen Rink of the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics. During this exchange, Rink remarked that individual cells long outlive whole bodies — and that supermarket chicken would surely still contain healthy cells.
Pynor’s photographic and videographic installation runs with this notion, tracing the processes that turn a live chicken into food. Plucked chickens are dignified through portraiture, while successive images of a chicken being plucked are subtly choreographed to suggest that the animal’s life is being rewound. Once fully plucked, it resembles a fetus in an egg.
Pynor dignifies and personalises the meat on our plate without hysteria, and sends a shiver of memento mori down the back of all but the most insensitive visitor. It is the emotional highlight of a show that, though driven by the high purpose of getting non-scientists thinking scientifically, will probably be more remembered for its cleverness and its wit.
Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2113412-flying-machines-and-chickens-the-art-of-thinking-about-science/#ixzz63gNvkEEM
for New Scientist, 19 October 2016
IN STANISLAW LEM’S bitterly utopian novel Return from the Stars, astronaut Hal Bregg comes back to Earth from a 10-year mission to find that 127 years have passed during his absence. The world that greets him is very different from the one he remembers. For one thing, its architecture absolutely refuses to stay put. Platforms slide past and around each other, walls and columns spring up out of nowhere, or fall precipitately away: the solid environment has liquefied. He worries – and is right to worry – that he will never find his feet in this new place.
The Paris-based artist Philippe Parreno is kinder than Lem. Visitors to his vast installation at London’s Tate Modern, Anywhen, get a carpet to lie on while the vast Turbine Hall shimmies and pulses around them. Let there be no doubt here: Parreno’s awful grey machine is triumphally futuristic, an interior so smart it has outgrown any need for occupants. Anywhen is thunderous, sulphurous, awful in its full archaic sense.
Visitors find themselves in a sort of aquarium, in which sound and light obey a claustrophobic new physics. Speakers descend from and ascend to the ceiling, relaying captured outside noise from nearby teenagers, a fragment of song, a passing aeroplane. Banks of lights flash. In a sudden hiatus, bits of colour drop down from somewhere on to a giant mobile screen and float off. Some are murky projections, but there are solid objects, too, in the shape inflatable fish. These seem a lot more at home in this shifting space than we do. Huge, white, architectonic panels reconfigure the dimensions of the gallery, moving up and down with more than random malevolence. Is this malevolence an illusion? Of course, but it’s an utterly convincing one – so much so that one wonders what the artist means by it.
Alas, Parreno is not here to answer. He has, it seems, ceded control of his installation to a colony of yeast, fed and watered in a small lab visible in an out-of-the-way corner. Changes in the colony’s temperature, growth and movement are variables in a biocomputed algorithm that will enrich the installation’s behaviour during its six-month run. It still remains to be seen whether those initial conditions are rich and complex enough to generate a significant creative work.
Right now, as you lie there, hands scrabbling for purchase on the thin carpet, it seems as if the Turbine Hall has been invested with a terrible, alien intentionality. Is this another illusion? It must be. And yet, how can we be sure?
The 17th-century German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz once came up with a thrilling but flawed argument for the existence of God. In one of his best-known works, Monadology, Leibniz invites readers to imagine that they are visiting “a machine whose structure makes it think, sense, and have perceptions”. There would be plenty to see: innumerable cogs, wheels, belts and gears.
But that, says Leibniz, is precisely the problem – “we will find only parts that push one another, and we will never find anything to explain a perception”. The same issue arises when we explore the brain: no amount of mapping, no amount of analogy, brings us any closer to the subjective “is-ness” of conscious experience.
Leibniz used his thinking mill to assert that the world is more than material, and that thinking must occur on another (divine) plane of existence. He was a glass-half-full sort of thinker, whose rambunctious belief in the essential goodness of the universe – all is for the best in the “best of all possible worlds” – drove an exasperated Voltaire to pen his savage satire Candide.
Anywhen is Leibniz’s mill made flesh in glass, wire and panelling. Lying on the grey Turbine Hall carpet, I couldn’t help but wonder with Voltaire how on earth Leibniz took comfort from his own story. Something is using the Turbine Hall to think with, but we can bet the farm it is not God. Imagine wandering into the toils of some vast, cool and unsympathetic intellect. Imagine the Martian has landed…
Visiting Ars Electronica for New Scientist, 21 September 2016
In a disused mail sorting office in Linz, Austria, an industrial robot twice my height has got hold of Serbian-born artist Dragan Ilic and is wiping him over a canvas-covered wall. Ilic is clutching pencils, and as the robot twirls and dabs him against the wall, the artist makes his own frantic marks – a sort of sentient brush head. These performances are billed as a collaboration between artist and machine. All I see is the user getting used.
Every September in Linz, the Ars Electronica festival tries to marry technology and art. Andy Warhol took up screen-printing in the 1960s, and a whole generation of gallery-goers have since grown up with the notion that this match is easy.
Indeed, the coupling of art and technology has become a solid pillar of art education, especially now that so much funding comes from IT big hitters such as Sony and private institutions like the Wellcome Trust.
But if the venerable Ars Electronica has demonstrated anything in its 37-year history – beyond the ability of the arts to remake and rejuvenate a city – it is that technology and art make astonishingly unhappy bedfellows.
This year, for example, Swiss artist Daniel Boschung used an industrial robot controlled by bespoke software to take 900-million-pixel portraits of people – forensic surveys so detailed that they drained all emotion from their subjects’ faces.
Not far away, another robot, Davide Quayola’s Sculpture Factory, chiselled through partially completed life-size stone renditions of Michelangelo’s David. The attention was directed to the pixelated nature of 3D scanning, which smeared, spread and tessellated the biblical giant-killer to the point of incoherence: here a limb, there an eye.
Walking the corridor towards the current sculpture-in-progress, one passed attempt after attempt of clone Davids peeking in more or less agonised fashion from their cuboid stone prisons, in a sort of mineral retread of that infamous scene from Alien: Resurrection.
The provoking thing about Ars Electronica is that it jams together boutique displays of the latest technology, trenchant criticisms of the post-industrial project, jokes and honest failures. It is a gargantuan vessel powered by enthusiasm, but steered by nothing remotely resembling taste.
Eventually, the visitor comes to rest against one of the more obvious wins. Boris Labbé’s film Rhizome, which netted the festival’s annual animation prize, unites watercolour illustration and digital effects to tell an epic tale of evolution, civilisation and cosmic transformation in one steady, heart-stopping reverse zoom.
And then there is Frank Kolkman’s OpenSurgery, which combines 3D printing and laser-cutting with hacked surgical pieces and components bought online. This is a DIY robot that can perform laparoscopic surgery – a terrifying comment on the way that hacking and “making” are increasingly expected to stand in for the real thing.
You’ll need a drink after all that, so head for Max Dovey’s A Hipster Bar. And good luck – this genuine pop-up drinking hole will, in true neo-liberal fashion, keep the gate shut unless its face-recognition system considers you “90 per cent hipster”.
As you sip, ponder this: it was the assertion of the Romantic movement that art makes us appreciate the beauty, richness and sheer size of the world. And technology, used appropriately, brings us closer to that sublime. As the Romantics’ acolyte, the writer and pioneering pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, put it: “The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.”
Even if that was true in 1939, it’s not true now: not now our drones do our flying for us; not now our technology has got away from us to the point where large portions of nature are being erased; not now we live mired in media and, indeed, have to make special efforts to escape it.
Naturally, artists want to explore the new technology of their day, but these days the best results seem to come when we misappropriate the machines and kick them into new shapes, or simply point and laugh.
The Starry Skies of Art, Serlachius Museums, Mänttä, Finland, to 8 January 2017. For New Scientist, 20 July 2016.
A FEW hours north of Helsinki, Finland, on the shores of a lake, sits an art museum, opened in the 1930s and much expanded since. Now one of its galleries is filled with 200 years’ worth of artistic visions of the skies, the work of Helena Sederholm, an art-education professor, and science writer Markus Hotakainen.
Scientific approaches to the cosmos are affectionately parodied in Andy Gracie’s Drosophila Titanus – a breeding project to adapt fruit flies for life on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon – and Agnes Meyer-Brandis’s Moon Goose Analogue: Lunar migration bird facility (MGA), which tries to realise, NASA-style, English bishop Francis Godwin’s story The Man in the Moone, whose hero flies to the moon in a chariot towed by “moon geese”.
Reductive approaches to the cosmos reach pathological levels in Marko Vuokola’s Been There, Seen It, Done That, in which the phases of the moon are reduced to a pattern of shadows cast by glass discs resting on a glass shelf.
A more elegaic exploration of the same idea (that we murder to dissect) lies in Petri Eskelinen’s 2016 installation Dying Star. After a few minutes, the viewer’s dark-adapted eye makes out a beautiful and convincing cloud of stars. At regular intervals, lights come on, revealing the cloud for what it is: smeared, worn Perspex sheets stuck with scraps of Post-it note and scrawled over with whiteboard pens: “Yes”; “No”; “No life field”. The night sky is reduced to a bitterly precise, tiresome, anthropocentric hunt for an earthlike planet.
The lights go out. The magic reasserts itself. To comprehend the world, we must reduce it. But as Penelope Umbrico ably reveals in 30,400,020 Suns from Sunsets from Flickr, the world is big enough to take our abuse. And in the moonlit landscapes by 19th-century artists Fanny Churberg and Hjalmar Munsterhjelm, it swallows us whole.
Sandi Mann’s The Upside of Downtime and Felt Time: The psychology of how we perceive time by Marc Wittmann reviewed for New Scientist, 13 April 2016.
VISITORS to New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2010 got to meet time, face-to-face. For her show The Artist is Present, Marina Abramovic sat, motionless, for 7.5 hours at a stretch while visitors wandered past her.
Unlike all the other art on show, she hadn’t “dropped out” of time: this was no cold, unbreathing sculpture. Neither was she time’s plaything, as she surely would have been had some task engaged her. Instead, Marc Wittmann, a psychologist based in Freiburg, Germany, reckons that Abramovic became time.
Wittmann’s book Felt Time explains how we experience time, posit it and remember it, all in the same moment. We access the future and the past through the 3-second chink that constitutes our experience of the present. Beyond this interval, metronome beats lose their rhythm and words fall apart in the ear.
As unhurried and efficient as an ophthalmologist arriving at a prescription by placing different lenses before the eye, Wittmann reveals, chapter by chapter, how our view through that 3-second chink is shaped by anxiety, age, boredom, appetite and feeling.
Unfortunately, his approach smacks of the textbook, and his attempt at a “new solution to the mind-body problem” is a mess. However, his literary allusions – from Thomas Mann’s study of habituation in The Magic Mountain to Sten Nadolny’s evocation of the present moment in The Discovery of Slowness – offer real insight. Indeed, they are an education in themselves for anyone with an Amazon “buy” button to hand.
As we read Felt Time, do we gain most by mulling Wittmann’s words, even if some allusions are unfamiliar? Or are we better off chasing down his references on the internet? Which is the more interesting option? Or rather: which is “less boring”?
Sandi Mann’s The Upside of Downtime is also about time, inasmuch as it is about boredom.
Once we delighted in devices that put all knowledge and culture into our pockets. But our means of obtaining stimulation have become so routine that they have themselves become a source of boredom. By removing the tedium of waiting, says psychologist Mann, we have turned ourselves into sensation junkies. It’s hard for us to pay attention to a task when more exciting stimuli are on offer, and being exposed to even subtle distractions can make us feel more bored.
Sadly, Mann’s book demonstrates the point all too well. It is a design horror: a mess of boxed-out paragraphs and bullet-pointed lists. Each is entertaining in itself, yet together they render Mann’s central argument less and less engaging, for exactly the reasons she has identified. Reading her is like watching a magician take a bullet to the head while “performing” Russian roulette.
In the end Mann can’t decide whether boredom is a good or bad thing, while Wittmann’s more organised approach gives him the confidence he needs to walk off a cliff as he tries to use the brain alone to account for consciousness. But despite the flaws, Wittmann is insightful and Mann is engaging, and, praise be, there’s always next time.
Borrowed Time, Jerwood Space, London, for New Scientist, 16 March 2016.
THE current crop of young artists showing in London look pretty incorruptible. Handed £20,000 each to make films about economic unease and ecological anxiety, Alice May Williams (fresh-ish out of Goldsmiths, University of London) and Karen Kramer (who cut her artistic teeth at the Parsons School of Design, New York City) have made video installations that deliver on this minatory brief. And they have done so with the sort of bloodless precision that leaves a visitor to Borrowed Time unsure whether to admire their high seriousness or worry at their apparent lack of character.
Be patient: both pieces reward closer attention. There are, ultimately, two very strong, staggeringly incompatible visions at work here.
Through its fictional narrator-protagonist, Kramer’s The Eye That Articulates Belongs on Land gives viewers the opportunity to wander the deserted, out-of-bounds byways neighbouring Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant while growing increasingly upset.
Actor Togo Igawa’s choked voice-over suggests a wronged salaryman driving back and forth over his pet shih-tzu. Pictures of urban dereliction lovingly reference the 2011 release of radioactive material from the plant (worldwide casualties to date: nil) while providing not much more than a passing reference to the tsunami (Tohoku district casualties: just shy of 16,000) that triggered the plant’s meltdowns.
The power plant offered us “a false promise of dominion” apparently – a formulation I’m sure to recall next time I turn on a kettle for a cuppa – before Nature Wrought Her Terrible Judgement.
Actually, Kramer might not be going this far – it’s hard to tell. But she is dangerously close, achieving with the line “They let loose a reaction here that belongs on the surface of the sun!” an impressive hat-trick: at once morally irrelevant, intellectually vacuous and factually incorrect. The piece then degenerates into a paranoid animation involving shards of uranium glass and a mummified fox.
Meanwhile, in Dream City – More, Better, Sooner, Alice May Williams invites us to stare at her toes, and, beyond, at the towers of the long-since decommissioned Battersea power station, a crumbling Art Deco masterpiece. This gem is currently aswarm with builders, surveyors, architects and their ilk as that swampy, vital, smelly, industrious corner of London gets a landscaped corporate makeover after 30 years of dithering.
Williams is taking deep, centring breaths, following the advice of a meditation teacher. She is learning to let go of past errors and future plans, and to embrace the now. In other words, Williams’s well-being involves letting go of the very forces, prejudices and habits that make her city tick. Can you imagine the mess we would be in if our utilities “embraced the now”? The disjunct between personal time and civic time is built steadily, with humour and poetry and a tremendous sense of mounting threat. “SHOP STAY EAT LIVE WORK and PLAY”, a hoarding screams. A promise or a threat?
“Sometimes we are right inside the drawings,” Williams sighs, interleaving the view from her window with corporate videos, blueprints and historical footage to capture the inevitable bind of city living. That bind has us living inside other people’s visions, hardly able to distinguish between big-business blather and the untethered voices of our own suicidal ideations.
Both films play to our fears, but only Williams understands what’s worth fearing. Disasters are not and never were the point. They are like rain and eclipses: inevitable. The reason we have complex societies is to handle disasters. A famine here, a flood there, a cave-in at the mine. The rest is window dressing, and none of it comes out the way it is meant to.
All over London, the kettles are boiling merrily as the old power station is turned into a retail-residential park “with community built in”. We can embrace the now all we want, but the city has no such luxury. That is what makes it such a terrifying friend.
for New Scientist, 27 January 2016
SEATTLE artist John Grade makes much of his ecological credentials when discussing Middle Fork – his 500,000-piece wooden sculpture of a 150-year-old giant hemlock. No trees were felled or harmed in its making, he says, although someone must once have fashioned the timber bridge from which the thumb-sized blocks of cedar were reclaimed.
Grade’s project is proudly lo-fi. Its 1:1 recreation of a living hemlock was made the old-fashioned way. Instead of using digital tools, Grade and his team preferred to make their mould by scaling the tree themselves to apply plaster.
Passers-by were welcome to drop by the MadArt studio in Seattle to stitch handcrafted blocks together over their mould. When the mould was removed, it revealed a physical manifestation of our cultural obsession with pixels, building blocks, Lego, Minecraft and other virtual approximations of nature.
Middle Fork is part of Wonder, an exhibition to celebrate the Renwick Gallery in Washington DC. The sculpture is both a salute to the gallery’s reopening after a two-year renovation, and an evocation of how, even when we try to tread lightly over Earth, we can’t resist a spot of weird tinkering. This hollow sculpture – so self-evidently natural, so glaringly artificial – might have been dragged fresh out of the uncanny valley.
And in a way, it was: after the exhibition, Grade’s sculpture will be laid to rot beside its original, next to the Middle Fork Snoqualmie river – in an area of Washington state made famous by Twin Peaks.