killing denouement

This might be some of the tightest stuff I’ve come across in a long time [via io9]. Artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey have discovered and developed a photographic technique which essentially imprints grass with an image. Science class taught us that grass is green because it produced chlorophyll from sunlight right? So it follows that when denied said light – with a shovel left on a lawn for example- the grass on the other side isn’t greener but rather various shades of faded. They discovered the technique in a similar way – an installation which featured a wall of living grass in which someone had left a ladder leaning against the wall. Underneath it was grass of a slightly different colour. Playing around with negative light projection, they found the grass could produce wonderful ranges of tonalities, replicating a photographic image. Problematic was the fact that it faded after a few days.

They said,

“We are exploring the capacity of grass to record complex photographic images through the production of chlorophyll. The equivalent of the tonal range in a black-and-white photograph is produced in the yellow and green shades of living grass. Although these organic “photographs” are exhibited in a fresh state for a short time, excessive light or lack of it eventually corrupts the visibility of the image.”

Genetically modified grass that found it hard to break down the chlorophyll proved to be the answer. To preserve the image – which has an exposure length of about a week – the artists dry out the images soon after this exposure, which retains the image. The grass dies, but the image lives on. If you’re interested, there’s a proper scientific explanation here

The face of things to come?
(I guess grass photography kind of begs for clichés to be bandied about?) So giant grass photoplates made of seedling grass are pretty innocuous (and wonderful). Getting excited about this made me look up their other stuff though, and while it’s fascinating, it starts getting into that uncomfortable realm of bio-art ethics again. Like this 2003 piece, Specific Natures. They call it

A time-based installation which poignantly evoked a promise of both regeneration and loss. Two figures cast in seedling grass, lay in adjacent display cabinets in a vacant store-front in the central shopping area of Chicago. Over a period of eight weeks passer’s by were able to witness the bodies as they became animated by the growing grass before they eventually dried and decayed.

I cal it a little scarily reminiscent of a dead anointed body upon a pyre, pre-cremation. Something in the human body (wikipedia calls it the Wick Effect) makeup creates a phenomenon in which bodies can sometimes ’sit up’ during the cremation, due to the way the body fat burns/breaks down – I don’t know the science behind it. It gives the very unsettling – and probably traumatic – appearance of a supposedly dead person crackling alive very briefly, before burning down to ashes. I’ve never actually witnessed this at a cremation but read about it once when I was 7 or so, and the thought has remained with me since. The book was Ganesh by Malcolm J Bosse; there’s a NYT review here. It really changed the way my small mind thought about a myriad of things, but most markedly Hinduism, family and the expat/third cuulture kid complex. I’d love to come across it again someday.

This is probably a very culturally-specific association, but even in itself, the idea of a living-dead body? A granted second life cycle when there was never a first? In a Chicago storefront window too, at that. Is this the next evolution of simulated reality TV – watching bodies decompose? Perhaps it’s fitting, then that in a later project, they proceeded to grow a grass mausoleum – perhaps to host these dead-alive bodies.

I like that Ackroyd and Harvey’s art makes me at once both thoughtful and thoroughly uncomfortable. Art rarely does that for me any more, save for bio art; I wonder why that is. Perhaps because it’s still (pardon the pun) fresh; each time new and as-yet unmarked by centuries of regurgitation? The ultra-realtime nature for our tech-frenzied hotwired lives? Some kind of anthropomorphic fascination? The faint repulsion and ensuing self-congratulation for still being able to access, or at least pretend at, some structured moral code? Elaine Brody has some interesting thoughts. As for me, I don’t know really, but I’m glad it’s around to de-desensitise at least myself, and hopefully others too?