Los Angeles artist Jennifer Steinkamp has been creating computer-generated botanical video installations for the last decade.
A spectacular new work, Madame Curie, just opened at the downtown gallery of the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art. It fills a 4,500 square foot gallery with swirling computer-generated flowering shrubs and trees based on a list of plants Madame Curie tended in her garden. YouTube doesn’t have any examples of this work yet, but you can see documentation at the artist’s own website [ here ].
The new work places the viewer into clouds of branches and flowers that swirl against a dark black background. This is a garden growing without a sun, reacting to an un-felt wind, out in space or down at some sub-atomic level. It’s all mysterious, exhuberant and flat-out beautiful.
Enjoy these short clips of some of her other works. And if you’re in San Diego through our flowery late winter or spring, stop by the museum for a look at this new piece. Meeting the work face-to-face is totally more engrossing than watching snippets on your computer. (Madame Cuire will also be on view in Los Angeles at ACME from February 12 — March 12 of this year.) It makes the plant world of Avatar look like bland Etch-a-Sketch drawings. And just imagine if this work were in 3D!
And here’s a final one that isn’t botanical, but it’s oh so cool, especially when you get into the space and interact with the projections:
Thanks to She Who Would Not Want To Be Named for sending me a link to a really interesting story in yesterday’s New York Times: Plants have been engineered through the dark arts of gene splicing to detect TNT at a level of sensitivity one hundred times greater than bomb-sniffing dogs.
In the presence of TNT vapors the leaves of the engineered Arabidopsis and tobacco plants blushed from green to white as chlorophyll drained out of the leaves. The process took several hours, so just imagine how slowly an airport check-in would move. Still, I think I’d rather be scanned by a plant than a radiation-emitting strip-search machine.
The research was published Wednesday in PLoS ONE under the catchy title “Programmable Ligand Detection System in Plants through a Synthetic Signal Transduction Pathway.” (Somebody please help scientists come up with titles that make sense to the rest of us.) The title in the Times is maybe even worse, in an insulting way, “Plants that Earn Their Keep.” Do plants have to justify their existence? Why does a plant have to “do something useful” in order to earn a place on this earth? Grrrrrr. Arrogant humans!
Anyway, airline travel has been at the front of my mind recently as I brace for a trip in a few days to Philadelphia. Monday I was brave enough to add the weather report to my desktop. Yikes! I’m not sure that I even recognize the weather icon for last Wednesday. It’s definitely one that’s never appeared on any San Diego forecast I’ve been around for!
In the general Philly area both Longwood Gardens and the Morris Arboretum have conservatories. Unfortunately I’m not likely to have much time to do sightseeing, but it’ll be interesting enough to see what some people call winter. But if there’s anything on the “must see” list, let me know.
Let me finish my ramble by returning briefly to the unpleasant topic of airline terrorism to say a couple words about these photos that were in the news a year ago that many of you recognize.
These are shots of the alleged “underwear-bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, probably taken during while he was attending school in London. I looked quickly at the main subject–really, what can a photograph tell you about a person? Maybe that a seemingly normal-looking person can attempt to do some awful things? Maybe that this person was not so isolated as not feel the peer-pressure to buy a hat with a Nike swoosh?
What I focused on next–and some of you gardeners out there have already guessed it–is the amazing backdrop of colorful foliage. What are those plants?, I asked myself. Then my brain wandered off into other areas: Did the suspect enjoy plants enough to think that this would be a scenic location for a portrait (on at least two occasions, looking at his change in clothing)? Or maybe the photographer dragged the resentful and unwilling subject out into the cold, into these spots with the colorful backgrounds?
I don’t know. The only possible answer I can pull out of all this is that the backdrop is the kind of foliage that people in areas of the world colder than mine get to experience.
Other than that I’m left with questions, only questions…
We have new neighbors immediately behind the house next door. One of their first acts was to erect this gonzo back deck.
The previous owner was a house-bound woman who for the last twenty years of her life lived mostly indoors. Her back fence stopped at the property line and was six feet high. We never saw her, she never saw us.
The new owners, a young couple, apparently didn’t care for the big dark fence getting in the way of their view. And they apparently didn’t think their back yard was large enough since the new deck juts out many feet into a city easement. I’m sure they have a great view of the ocean. But using the equation, I can see them = They can see us, I’m certain they also have a tremendous view of my back yard.
There are a few islands of privacy. This black bamboo provides a little bit of screening–if you’re standing in just the right spot.
But this view from the bedroom window shows that the isn’t much privacy from much of the garden. I planted a Dr. Hurd manzanita in front of the bamboo, before the new neighbors moved in. Once it hits its twelve foot target, it’ll help provide some shelter. But being a manzanita it’s taking its good old time getting larger. Had I known we’ve have this privacy issue I’d have planted something faster growing, maybe a desert willow.
A few things get in the way of planting more large plants on the property line. There’s a buried drain–not the best thing to plant a small tree over. This is also the the southern edge to the property. A tree would provide some shelter, but it would also shade a garden populated with sun-loving plants and homeowners. Also, the previous owners of our house installed a large fishpond in what would be the most welcome spot for a small tree.
We’re still trying to think of what to do. Until we have a larger plan in place, we’re letting some plants get taller than we otherwise might. This mystery shrub came with the house. Although it’s growing too close to a fence to let it get very large, we’re still letting it grow taller. There’s one of these plants in the canyon nearby and the best idea I have is that if it’s native it might be a Pacific wax myrtle (Morella (formerly Myrtica) californica), but I think the ID is incorrect because Calflora shows its native range ending to the north, in Los Angeles County.
Here’s a closer look at the foliage. Later in the year it has tiny white flowers with an insanely powerful fragrance–gardenias on steroids, maybe. Feel free to send me any ideas for this plant’s identity. It’s probably wishful thinking on my part thinking this is a native instead of an escapee from one of the local gardens.
[ EDIT, January 24 ] Well, I knew you guys would come through! Maggie and Bahia have pointed me in the right direction. Thinking that it was a local native was definitely wishful thinking on my part. The mystery shrub is a Victorian box, Pittosporum undulatum. The fact that it’s escaped into at least one spot in the local canyon makes me think that this is destined not a long-term plant, particularly when you consider that it can get massive size for a suburban lot, not to mention it’s ridiculously close placement to the fenceline.
The California Invasive Plant Council describes its problem potential this way: “Infestations in CA are small. More problematic on north coast.” Not the worst plant, but I could definitely do better.
The privacy problem could be worse. The neighbors spend almost no time outdoors, and much of that is in the relative privacy of darkened evenings.
Still, gardens are as much about fantasy as they are reality. It’s not that we’re doing anything particularly scandalous in the back yard, really. But if we were, we wouldn’t want the neighbors to see!
The front garden, like the rest of my lot, mixes California natives with exotics from all over. Our local bladderpod in the foreground, yellow and perky and virtually ever-blooming, with a big clump of aloe that owns January.
Folks in colder climates may be drooling a bit, but there’s a price for year-round gardens: Year-round weeds! Since this is Bloomday, let me start off with a few weeds in bloom, doing their best to generate even more weeds. There are times when I think that it might be nice to live where you can forget about weeding for three months or more…
Weedy nightshade, right before I pulled it up
Weedy chammomile relative, Pineapple Weed
Pure yellow evil, from the big family that gives us sunflowers
Weedy grass
California native Corethrogyne (Lessingia) filaginifolia duking it out with weedy alyssum
But through the magic of photography, an artistic medium well suited to telling lies and half-truths, here are some blooms for the month. I could tell you there are no weeds around these blooming plants, but then I’d be lying. Big time.
From California, and the California floristic province:
Hummingbird sage, Salvia spathacea
A prostrate form of the local black sage, Salvia mellifera, picking up its flowering
Our local very fragrant nightshade, Solanum parishii
Winnifred Gilman sage, with a few scant flowers, not quite buying into the fact that spring is coming.
Tree Coreopsis or Giant Coreopsis, Coreopsis gigantea, still a ways to go before achieving tree status
San Diego Sunflower, Bahiopsis (Viguiera) lacinata, battling iceplant on the slope
One of almost a dozen monkeyflower seedlings. It is definitely partly Mimulus aurantiacus, but other species could be involved.
Verbena lilacina
A lone Coast Sunflower, Encelia californica, with way too many weeds back on the neglected slope garden
Santa Cruz Island Buckwheat, Eriogonum arborescens
Our local chaparral currant, Ribes indecorum, pleasant, not spectacular
Arctostaphylos manzanita Dr. Hurd
Astragalus nuttallii, from the California Central Coast
Okay, everyone, say awwwwww. Carpenteria california
From beyond California:
Your basic prostrate rosemary
The last of the bicolor narcissus. I didn’t get the camera out while it was looking nice.
A kalanchoe species or Edit January 17 Cotyledon orbiculata–see first comment from Elephant’s Eye
Your basic jade plant
Crassula multicava, a low groundcover with vaporous little jade-plant-like flowers floating above it
Arctotis Big Magenta
Another Arctotis hybrid
Your basic prostrate rosemary
People generally grow aeoniums for their foliage…
…but they also have a month or so when their flowers can upstage the plant.
And humans aren’t the only species that appreciates the flowers. Look closely and you’ll see quite a few ants going to town…
Two forms of Oxalis purpurea, purple– and green-leaved. It’s pretty, but best contained in warmer climates where it can spread.
Sleepy Oxalis purpurea flower, slowly unfurling as the morning advances, feeling blurry until until the sun hits it.
Green rose in bud…
Green rose unfurled…looking a little less green.
Checking out the garden, photographing flowers, you get to see what’s going on in the garden. I’ve mentioned the weeds already. Now, let’s add gopher holes into the mix shall we?
While I’ve pretty much given up trying to control the gophers, I can at least pick away at the weeding. Okay, enough blogging for now. Time to pull some weeds. But maybe I’ll check out a few more Garden Bloggers Bloom Day posts first…
What are bloggers talking about during these cold January days? Here’s an addictively fun way to find out.
Wordle lets you generate word clouds that are stunningly beautiful to look at. The site calls itself “a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide,” but I’d argue that it’s an interesting way to figure out the gist of what’s being discussed.
Word clouds have been around for a few years now. I wrote about them back in the earlier days of this blog, and this blog displays a tag cloud on the left panel. But Wordle gives you all sorts of control over things like color, font, language and arrangement. Just click on the home page’s “Create” tab to get going. All you need is some canned text, a link to a blog or website with an RSS or Atom feed, or you can enter a del.icio.us username to see a cloud of their tags.
Here’s a quick Wordled look at some of the posts on some California mostly-gardening blogs. I selected black backgrounds for all of them so that there’s a basis for comparing them visually, but I had way too much fun creating color combinations and picking fonts and word arrangements. The blog contents should be current as of last night, January 13.
(There are a huge number of these. I’ve been home with a cold, too messed up to think coherently–but not too compromised to play with shapes and pretty colors. It makes me wonder whether the part of the brain that thinks is even in the same zip code as where artistic activity takes place…)
To start off, the content of this blog, before this post…
So, after looking at of these, do you think the word clouds begin to fairly represent what the blogs are discussing? Or is Wordle really just a toy?
It’s time for my annual tribute to the winter sycamore trees. The week of rain leading up to Christmas has left most of the trees bare, their leaves on the ground.
So, when life mainly gives you fallen leaves, that’s mainly what I’ve taken photos of this year. I won’t call this great art but I do like the square shot of the bare branches…maybe a little Jackson Pollack or Harry Callahan…
The question I’ve been asking myself a lot this season: Is it just my imagination, or do the leaves more often than not land butter-side-down, with their top sides usually against the dirt? Maybe the way they’re weighted? Or are they unstable if they land on their stems so that the wind blows them over?
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