Tadpole Strolling and Saving the World With Dr. Natalie Jeremijenko

However you describe Natalie Jeremijenko — Dr. of  Computer Science, electrical engineer, sci-artist, environmental artist, neuroscientist — her stellar academic credentials (Yale, NYU, Stanford, U. of Queensland) won’t help enlighten exactly why she’s hanging trees upside down, engineering tadpole strollers, texting fish in the toxic tides of New York Harbor or suggesting that we start eating cotton candy made out of flowers and laced with bee pollen.

But these eccentric sounding projects are actually observable constructions designed to illuminate abstract, global environmental problems and address them at a local level.

Jeremijenko is doing nothing less than leading the charge for an eco-mindshift to transform the way we think about our environment. And revolutions of a non-violent kind require vivid imaginations grafted with scientific data management and engineering. Therein lies Jeremijenko’s art, and her art lives far beyond a gallery’s spotlighted walls. They exist on city rooftops as towering gardens designed to help cleanse the air and support pollinators, and they exist as mini-environments in the no-parking spaces in front of Manhattan sidewalk fire hydrants. In short, her art appears wherever she is.

Jeremijenko will be on hand April 3 in Chestertown for the SANDBOX spring lecture at Washington College as part of a wider collaboration of artists for the “Sensing Change Creativity” program to be held throughout Chestertown April 3-6.

For Jeremijenko, currently the Director of xDesign Environmental Health Clinic and Associate Professor of Art and Education at NYU, the “Sensing Change” event offers another opportunity to demonstrate hands-on how we can restructure our relationship to the environment by “scripting” dynamic interrelationships between humans, non-humans, and our shared ecosystem. Her projects are not flights of fancy into the theoretical but are designed for real-world applications so that we will “reimagine” our place in the web of life by synthesizing ecology, technology and art. While a tadpole stroller or texting fish might sound fraught with whimsy there’s a ton of social, scientific and political implications stealthily woven into it.

The Tadpole Bureacratic Protocol is one of Jeremijenko’s more widely publicized environmental monitoring devices. “We are witnessing an extinction of amphibians and frogs right now,” Jeremijenko says in an interview with Jacob Gordon at Treehugger Radio. “In terms of species, it is more serious than the extinction of the dinosaurs. And frogs survived the dinosaur’s extinction, right? But they are not surviving whatever it is that we are doing.”

Tadpoles happen to be extremely sensitive to their environment and quickly respond to toxicity levels. To engage people who are concerned with the quality of their local water quality, for example, Jeremijenko would ask that a tadpole live in a sample of the same water. Her xDesign clinic even engineered a stroller for a globe habitat. As an added political ingredient, she shrewdly suggests that the tadpole be named after a bureaucrat responsible for local water quality.

“You can take it out walking in the evening, which of course, makes your neighbors ask you what the hell you’re doing. Then you would explain why you’re raising a tadpole in this water sample, and that you have concerns about it, and they would probably share the same concerns,” she told Treehugger Radio.

“We’re in a crisis of agency right now. What can little old me do, we ask? How can we take a global issue and address it locally. I think the artist has a central role in reframing these questions,” Jeremijenko says.

Her XDesign Environmental Health Clinic is a shining example of her message: to redefine Health as an understanding that health depends on local external environments rather than just internal biology or genetics. Where a sick person would go to a doctor for a prescription, a person with environmental worries can go the Environmental Health Clinic. Jeremijenko calls her clients “impatients’ because a requirement for their visit is to be impatient about the lack of effective environmental legislation.  Even her logo, an emblazoned red “X,’ the iconic medical red cross turned on its side speaks to the transformative nature of her work. If it all sounds a bit tongue in cheek, be careful—while there’s a flair of whimsy streaking through her work it’s created atop a mountain of scientific data and informed by her vast interdisciplinary expertise.

 

Because of the success of the environmental movement in amplifying the dialogue about global warming and biodiversity loss, Jeremijenko feels that it’s imperative we uphold but move beyond our current ideas about conservation—the Sierra Club conservation approach—into a direct engagement with our local environment.

Jeremijenko will initiate several projects while working with students in the College’s SANDBOX Program for Creativity in the Environment. Among her ‘builds’ will be the AgBag, an easily constructed flower environment designed to be suspended from railings or any architectural support and contained by biodegradable Tyvak building material sewn into bags. She explains that AgBags are especially useful to support biodiversity in urban areas. “It’s an opportunity to not only grow edible flowers (black pansies are best, she says) that offer high antioxidents, but they will also support pollinators while increasing leaf surface indexes and therefore air quality.”

Another project will be created as a “prescription” to aid butterfly pollinators by building bridges of flowers over heavy traffic area. These Butterfly Bridges not only enhance the region but again act as agents for multiple effects: saving pollinators while creating additional leaf surface to help clean the air.

Another interesting project the Australian born artist/engineer has undertaken in recent years is a Phenological Clock. The Phenological Clock upends our human-centric quotidian universe and re-translates the meaning of time as a convergence of diverse and interdependent organisms and becomes a visual indicator of climate destabilization and offers us a way to reframe our collective relationship to natural systems. From Jerimijenko’s  projectxclinic site she wrote,” The phenological clock displays when local organisms bud, bloom, emerge or migrate on a Jan thru December clock face. These observable seasonal events are arranged in concentric annual circles, one for each species: perennial flowering plants in the innermost circles; the insects, butterflies, bees and moths that are dependent on these are next surrounding set of circles; the birds, dependent on insectivorous resources are next; and then local trees and their large biomass and habitat provisions are positioned as the outmost annual rings. For instance when a flowering perennial plant buds, leafs out and flowers are all captured in the same circle, the color of which is characteristic of the organism.”

 

Alex Castro, Director of SANDBOX, sees Jeremijenko’s visit to Washington College in iconic terms. “For SANDBOX, Natalie is the very embodiment of its core principles: compelling art, strong science, and creative energy in the extreme. Having someone of such international esteem come here to engage both the College and the town is pure delight as well as a challenge to us all to take a creative, active part in the condition of our natural surroundings,” Castro says.

As news pours in daily of a planet in crisis—this week’s BP oil spill into Lake Michigan, the January water contamination in Charleston, West Virginia—Jeremijenko observes that every day offers us an opportunity to understand and employ through the merging of art and science a solution that can be used at a local level. Art, for Jeremijenko, is not a product to be sold or hung on a wall, it is a process and revolutionary companion to science that can give us hope right here, right now, on our street, in our town, in our lives, today.

See her, Thursday , April 3, 5 PM at the Decker Theatre, Washington College.

For more information about Dr. Jeremijenko, watch her TED talk.

To find out more about the “Sensing Change” event to be held April 3 — 6, go here for more details.