Ecology Science and ART!
So, I did go out and right away buy the book To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a sustainable Planet, by Linda Weintraub. I immediatly saw the value in connecting the artists in this book to my art classes, and especially in the STEAM Academy. There are so many interdisciplinary connections in this book it's rather astounding. For both students and teachers who are not as familiar with the scope of contemporary art, the interdisciplinary, community and technology connections that can take place in fine art, this is a good book to blow their mind. As I was searching for an artist I could relate to current projects happening in the STEAM academy the work of Andy Gracie really pulled me in. He received a BFA from Liverpool Polytechnic School of the Arts and works with video, soundscapes, instillations and for lack of a better word, documented experiments. His methods include, growing, breeding, programing, building, and data analysis. His work subjects include plants, fruit flies, fish, artificial intelligence, oceanography, astrobiology, communication between biological systems, technological systems and social systems.....He is kind of a difficult artist to digest, but of course I'm speaking as an artist. From a scientist's perspective I wonder how easy it is to digest his science.
The piece that is featured in the book is called Fish, Plant, Rack from 2004. This piece is essentially a self sufficient aquaponics system with the addition of a learning robot that chooses when to add nutrients to the plants. It Fish Plant Rack is an experiment of how a closed system feedback loop between an elephant nose fish who emits electrical impulses from it's nose, the robot who reads it, the program who turns the impulses to binary code and learns from the information the fish is sending it, which then allows the robot to choose which of the plants it feeds, the live image of the plants then are projected onto a tiny screen next to the aquarium for the fish to see. A random, not terribly efficient, but functioning system where the fish, the plants and the robot are all in communication with each other.
He's done a lot of crazy stuff. Here's a site that shows a video from the Drosphila Titanus project- which is a long term projects that experiments with the artificial selection breeding of fruit flies bred specifically to survive on Saturn's largest moon Titan. Almost as crazy as the artist Brandon Ballengée who took a frog and bred it backward to bring back it's extinct ancestor. Yeah. Artists have become for real Frankensteins.
He has been working in Spain at an artist's residency on a project called 200 Meters, exploring the bottom of the ocean, in his own words, from his blog,
"This was a project commissioned by Laboral Centro de Arte and the Port Authority of Gijon, from an open call for artists to respond to the theme of the ocean science. My response was to make a DIY investigation of the point of change between sea and deep sea – a depth of 200m – and to record as much data as I could. The project became less DIY than I had planned, thanks to the amazing support of the Spanish Oceanographic Institute, and delivered more than its fair share of adventure and surprise."
And, If you're super cool, here's a little video about that project, in Spanish. Yes, he's an artistic, scientific genius and he speaks Spanish. Sigh.
So anyway, there is a group of students at Metro who have been working on perfecting an aquaponics system. Last semester they successfully bred tilapia, and there are dozens of baby tilapia who are ready to be moved to a larger breeding tank. The fish then poop in the water, the water is pumped through pipes that are growing plants, (in this case lettuce) in gravel, fertilizing the plants and filtering the water then back in the tank all clean for the fish.
The aesthetics of the current system at Metro is currently lacking. My challenge for all of the teams in the STEAM academy is to think about how good design is the marriage of form and function and that while the aquaponics system is cool, it would be so much easier to tweet about it if it looked cool. So while I do believe that, and the students also understand that, the way things looked always took a back seat. After reading about this artist I spoke to the aquaponics team about his work and challenged them to take their work one step further. How could they create something new? Incorporate robotics? Involve the audience? Make the system interactive? The "A" in STEAM stands for more than fine art, it is the backbone of creative thinking and innovation.
My challenge as an art teacher is to help students, co-teachers and myself break down the barriers between disciplines to create a truly collaborative, innovative and project oriented learning environment. By introducing artists that seem to be more scientists than painters, we can all begin to redefine our new roles as creative thinkers and problem solvers.
