Real Ecologies — A View from Somewhere
The project started out as a series of discrete digital microscopic video interactions between organic and synthetic substances that explored the overlap between scientific and artistic practices emphasizing both the material and aesthetic question of what is real. Philosopher Ian Hacking, in Representing and Intervening posits, “As the criterion for determining what is real, we shall count as real what we can use to intervene in the world to affect something else, or what the world can use to affect us.”
A performative scientific practice takes into account that knowing doesn’t come from standing back and observing from a distance but instead employs the technique of direct engagement with the material world. The artist, like the scientist, can often render the invisible, visible while working in-between boundaries of real and artificial. The scientist however, through empiricism, must take an hypothesis out of “play”, whereas the artist can continue to explore uncontested. The final version of the project included a display case that served as a viewing station revealing a glimpse of material manifestation of the microenvironments and an observer could experience ‘real time’ the aesthetic effects of entropy throughout the course of the exhibition.
excerpt from video
