photo by Cindy Baker

Check out this wonderful post about our show in Edmonton by Visualeyez animator Cindy Baker…

Click on the photo to go to Kelly's slide show!

Kelly and I grew culture(s) in Edmonton’s Latitude 53 gallery.  Who knew that bacteria could make such great performance artists?

Agar – my favourite new medium…

Community activist, Judith Bauer has initiated a garden in Griffintown near New City Gas. With plants donated by community members and the city of Montreal, there grows an urban oasis amidst concrete and parking lots. The soil is likely contaminated with toxins from years of industry and runoff from the adjacent train tracks yet the garden is rife with vegetables… They’re probably no good for eating but they may make some nice babies.

So here it is, Kinder/Garden on the outside… this time with tomatoes!

I have attempted to salvage a few Kinder plants. Here are squash plants crawling up my back staircase. Unfortunately they’re not exactly thriving – the already-present bugs and trauma of the move may have been too much.  I’ve also planted a few of Kelly’s tomatoes, peppers, herbs and some kind of radishy thing.  Despite the lovely warm weather we’ve been having and the regular neem oil treatments, aphids are ever-present and leaves continue to die. My front mockorange has also been plagued by aphids and I’ve been contending with powdery mildew too.

On a more pleasant note, here’s our dog and the tree peony that I carried home on the bus four years ago. It is now about five times its original size and had 27 blooms this year…

My lovely yellow babies turn white with exposure (to light) – there’s an assimilation metaphor in there somewhere…

And finally (!), Squash & Stretch: The Secret Life of Zucchinis is completed and ready for festival submissions. Check it out here (in HD!)

It will premiere next weekend (no idea when or for how long) at the Think Box, a multimedia screening for Congress 2010 in the atrium of the John Molson Building, Concordia University. Additionally I’ll take part (as will Kelly and other other classmates, Vanessa, Antonia and Claire) in a Pecha Kucha-style presentation of our classwork for Tagny at the MAI.

My name is spelled wrong – but whatever…

Otherwise, I’m not sure where this project is going in terms of continued growth. Will I plant more seeds? Try other models? Will I ever blog about all the issues I’ve put off for months? What about a conference paper? Gallery submissions? Arts festivals? Who knows?

I made more pickles this week…

Napoleon, showed me this “making of” video from the Plant episode of the BBC series Life.

While I cannot deny the beauty of this documentary and the technical achievement of those who created it, I feel a bit ambivalent the timelapse work. It seems to me that these shots hide as much about unobserved plant growth as they reveal. The technology of the camera is presented as an external neutral observer and time is not so much compressed as it is removed, with the denial of night and weather through the (obscured) substitution of outdoor space with a studio and artificial lighting.

While our timelapse may have been quick and dirty, movements of shadow, sunrises and sunsets restore an understanding of time that the timelapse takes away. We can see the effects of cloudy days, how some blossoms open just before dawn and close at midday and plants’ continued growth after dark. And then there is the technology.

Our web cameras are embedded in the ecology of the greenhouse. They often sit among the plants like insects, sentinels who tell us when to pollinate, when to visit more often and as they fall and shift with plant growth, wind, and waterings, they and the plants modify shots and edits. Power outages happen, vines disconnect cables, and well, stuff happens. Today a camera had flipped over, one workstation had stopped shooting, another kept beeping at me. That seems a lot more like nature to me than a one minute re-enactment of one year when the sun never moves, weather never changes and plants filmed in 96 different shots are presented as if they are all growing together.

Here’s some raw footage taken last week (May 4th-7th) on Napoleon’s workstation in the greenhouse.

One of the Magda hybrids will finally carry a fully formed baby to term. Previous attempts with the other moulds yielded unrecognizable (but tasty!) monsters or the fruit shrivelled and died (see right) – possibly due to premature moulding or failed pollination…

I’ve moved the surveillance toward growing tomatoes. There are lots – we didn’t bring in vibrators (or bees) but regular shaking seems to be working…

As you can see below they’ve taken over. Look what has happened in the 99 days since we moved in!

May 10, 2010

February 1, 2010