Crickets Chirping

On Salon there’s an article about Natalie Jeremijenko: The artist as mad scientist. If you don’t have a Salon account, you can read it here.

Jeremijenko used to organize rock music festivals in Australia in the eighties, has a slew of degrees in subjects that end in -ology (in addition to PhDs in CS and EE [swooon]), does conceputal art that combines science, environmentalism and politics. And she’s a mom.

Google her. I cannot describe how cool I think she is. An example of her work:

Jeremijenko spliced into the controversy in 1999 with her project “One Trees.” When daily news about decoding the human genome had us all fearing we were programmed by DNA, she and a California nursery produced hundreds of clones of a walnut tree from its stem-cell-like tissue. She placed the tiny sprouts in individually sealed cups and displayed them at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. The various shapes into which the plantlets sprouted in uniform environments underscored that genes alone don’t sit in nature’s director chair, but are one of many biological processes. Later, she planted 20 pairs of the trees in various places in the San Francisco Bay Area. Now she gave urban reality its turn in the spotlight by demonstrating how social conditions — the trees were planted in poor and wealthy neighborhoods — caused the genetically identical trees to blossom into a bounty of sizes, some rising into the open sun with vigor, others drooping under the industrial shade.

I am fond of pointing out something in the same vein as what she’s saying with the One Trees project:identical twins have different fingerprints. DNA is only part of the story- developmental factors contribute a large part of what makes us unique and they are not predetermined. The she continues in the second part of the project by planting the clones in neighborhoods with different income levels, to demonstrate the point on a macro scale. I wonder how the trees are doing, comparatively.

Check out her project page.