Fetch

To Fetch a Pail of Water (2018)
Robert C Beck and Sarah Max Beck
Ongoing installation research project, studioHydrostatic bioart lab, Museum of American Glass, Symbiotic Spheres,
April-December 2018

Material list: Glass, wood, pvc, post-consumer plastic, aluminum, steel, electronics, John’s urine, composting worms, strawberries, horse tail rush, venus fly traps, fiber optic grass, taro, canna, tiger nut, spider plant, various wetland volunteer plants, lemon balm, cilantro, aloe, katuk, monstera deliciosa, duck weed, earth, water, rock dust, micro organisms, mycorrhizae, ghost shrimp, three southeastern leopard frog tadpoles

This scaled down version of a wetland ecosystem asks the question where is “nature” now? Where does it live now, in the anthropocene? Our hypothesis is that the romantic, and fictional, premise of the unspoiled-by-man-terra firma as the true “capital-N” nature is as detrimental to Earth’s biome as any extractive and parasitic human interactions with it. The biodiversity that is being pushed and scraped, sprayed and buzzed back to the literal margins of civilization is being reduced to a cut here style dotted line and our experiments with this work are explorations of our roles in the threshold of the new-normal, or, the human-stewarded landscape.

Have you heard the good news, brother? The Earth is going to be swallowed by the Sun one day, so get your shit together! Now is your chance to stop being a parasite before you die!

Wait, what?

Talking to others was even harder. The early work sometimes seemed too reserved compared to our dire concern for the subject matter, and we sometimes seemed to be preaching, fire and brimstone style, with no repentance options, really. Are we talking about the same things, or is the work saying something else? Should we even be saying the same things? Our friends and families responded along a continuum of teasing, mocking, disgust, rejection, bewilderment, curiosity, celebration and emulation. That hasn’t changed much.

Dinner parties. You used what to grow this salad? I guess they didn’t read the blog, oops.

The experimental direction of this project, as it relates to the current exhibition, Symbiotic Spheres, points to understanding that the survival of human life depends upon our ability to evolve with/adapt to the rapidly shifting global environment. It presupposes that evolution is happening now and is evidenced by the living arrangement of art, science, technology and glass presented in this exhibit.

Curator, Benjamin Wright, recently introduced us to the work of evolutionary biologist and National Medal of Science recipient, Lynn Margulis. In a 2004 interview, when asked how she became interested in science she responded, “I never believed what they told me, I believed in what I saw myself… I found life interesting and I learned how to tell bullshit from propaganda… Science was not a question of your political opinion or your orientation, it was a way of finding out about the world directly through evidence.”

Best known for her Serial Endosymbiotic Theory (SET), she went on to explain, “Random mutation is never enough to go from one species to the next… When you get something that’s really novel, that is a new species, a new organ, new tissues, new organelles, new features in evolution, it’s never by random mutation.” She theorized that evolution is more likely the result of new mutually beneficial relationships that are formed between organisms and environments; symbiosis is the major driver of evolutionary change.

Our takeaway has appropriately been along the line of more questions. What is evolution? Can we evolve without mutation? Does our use of technology for adaptation count as mutation? Does it cause mutation? Are we, the technologically advanced cyber mutant offspring, the self-realized agents of evolution?

In order for us to evolve and adapt as a species, we must be open to a conversation with our environment; we must be able to understand, through observation, what the environment is telling us and then respond accordingly. To put it another way, some 99 percent of the species that have ever lived on this planet are now extinct and yet, humans have the unique ability to learn seemingly endless amounts of superfluous drivel, mark down little squiggles in a certain order and understand it later as history.

Humans have, thanks to feedback, the perspective -precognition almost, even- of what is most likely to come and the ability to respond and prepare. We’ll wager a bet that there weren’t a whole bunch of species before us that KNEW they were headed for extinction, and could take action to avoid it, or at least extend their stay. This is how science and art work together for the two of us. Science observes, records, quantifies, theorizes and experiments; and our creative practice helps us understand how we should be responding to that data and what questions to ask next. For us, art is the process of intuitive conversation.

BIG S SCIENCE
BIG A ART

Margulis was also the co-developer of James Lovelock’s Gaia theory which is the hypothesis that the Earth’s surface is a self regulating super-ecosystem and is proprioceptive, or, to a certain extent, self-aware. In her book, Symbiotic Planet, she explains that Gaia is “an emergent property of interaction among organisms… the series of interacting ecosystems that compose a single huge ecosystem at the Earth’s surface.”

After decades of derision, the greater scientific community has mostly accepted Margulis’ SET but so far only bits of Gaia. Gaia theory is too… religious-y, palatable, overarching, cross discipline; too much of a paradigm shift for big-S science. Like SET, art nor science is random. It’s where the conversation takes place, publicly. Our body of artwork is really about the process of adaptation and the failures, ridiculousness of it all and the successes along the way.

We’d rather bury our hands (and heads) in some rich, loamy plot of earth off some place lush, pure, agrarian and L.L.Bean ad material and farm and paint and never talk to another human again (including ourselves and each other) but we can’t un-hear the screams of protest, the knocking on our door of the war-torn, climate change ravaged refugees, the mass death silence of false-bliss-promising-opioids, the continued march of industrialization, the hollow sympathy of politics and we understand that we must evolve symbiotically or perish. To quote Margulis, we must “save ourselves from ourselves.”

I Guess We Told You That to Tell You This

According to SET, new speciation is not the result of random mutation or natural selection alone; it’s more likely the result of new mutually beneficial relationships that are formed between organism and environment. The father of Gaia theory, James Lovelock, states that the Earth responds to feedback to regulate its biome. With this in mind, human intelligence collectively (some of the collective) is communicating that it is time to adapt, as the toxic byproducts of our activities have long been outweighing the products. Climate change arguments aside, one need only look around and ask if human activity is helping build and diversify ecosystems or sterilize and replace them with mechanization.

For artists, this is especially challenging as the current dogma of our profession is often found to demand the archival conservation of consumerism and, more often than not, industrialized practices and the net consumption of more resources. What would the art of the 22nd century look like, if we were to successfully adapt and turn our current toxic “human nature” into a beneficial relationship with our environment?

Lovelock, an early, well known climate change sentinel, spoke of one of his experiments and stated summarily that planting trees didn’t work to help the environment. Getting the goad of pretty much every environmentalist follower he had, he went on to conclude it didn’t work because “you can’t plant an ecosystem.” But permaculture concepts say you can and many people around the world are busy doing just that. We’ve built one in the museum, and it, like all the rest of the planted ecosystems, have as much an impact on us as we have on them. Do they need to be stewarded by humans? Yes, and welcome to the Anthropocene.

This relationship has become a central topic to us. Wanting to live more sustainably led to wanting to build an artistic practice that constructively supported our own evolution towards being environmentally economic with our choices and actions. Closing the loop of waste and seeing it as a resource ain’t so simple and seems to require a paradigm shift. Who knew paradigm shifts could be so damned inconvenient? Experience demonstrated, often in fits and farts and exercises in frustration, just how difficult this process is and ultimately has thrown many doubts, fears, and instances of cognitive dissonance back towards us as we press onward with our french-press, organic, rainforest-alliance, fair-trade caffeine-fueled experimentation. Invaluable feedback, really.