NURSERY RHYME & REASON
Kinder/Garden is a research/creation project wherein I will attempt to grow human baby- and/or foetal-shaped zucchinis in the Concordia University Hall Building rooftop nursery. I imagine this excessively mediated cultivation of summer squash as a three-month performance that enacts tensions between notions of nature and artifice, discipline and agency, normalcy and aberrance. The work will encompass a range of practices from the purchase and transformation of generic digital infants into plastic moulds[1], to the surveillance of plants whose fruit will be physically forced by these same moulds into submission or rebellion as they grow to maturity. Technological intervention occurs at multiple sites in the reproductive cycles of domesticated life forms–vegetable, animal and human. This project literally and figuratively echoes and questions the control and agency of living things operating through diverse hierarchical layers of objects, subjects, individual researchers, and institutions.
As a primarily process-driven work, ongoing documentation and self-reflexivity will form essential elements of this project. Various techniques of visualization will be employed as I produce still and moving images throughout various stages of the production. This will include computer-generated images of digital models, photographs of mould-making, and regular and microscopic images of seeds, plants and vegetables. If budget and environmental considerations permit, I would like to install continuous live online surveillance of the plants and generate time-lapse video of vegetable growth. These images will be used during class and conference presentations, where I will also present pickled specimens of my zucchini babies and hopefully a live, foetal/vegetable-bearing plant.
Ongoing written reflections comprise another mode of project documentation. Weekly journal entries to a project website/blog will record process and progress, while inviting commentary from classmates, friends and anyone who happens to encounter this public site. Here, I will present visual documentation of the project and external links to related research and resources. Furthermore, the Kinder/Garden blog is where I will write about and respond to the unexpected. As I work my way through the multiple material practices required to realize this project, I expect to generate many new research questions. How much the squash resemble humans will not be a measure of Kinder/Garden’s success. They might conform into a series of identical idealized infants or prove to be an uncooperative lot of mutant squash. Either way, they will certainly make some baby/food for thought.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.
[1] I will be replicating a process (using vacuum-formed clear plastic moulds to shape vegetables) patented in 1989 by Richard Tweddell III (US Patent 4,827,666). Tweddell’s company Vegiforms, Inc. produces and sells a variety of plastic moulds for home gardeners.
