Disco for Darwin (2011-

Disco for Darwin is a reinterpretation of Charles and Sir Francis Darwin's documentation of their work with movement and plants from the text The Power of Movement in Plants (1880). Plants are always moving in a circular direction, a spiralling from the moment the cotyledon emerges from the seed. This vegetal animation was studied in depth by Darwin in the late nineteenth century through a series of analogue motion-tracing techniques meant to analyze the movement and behaviors of various plant species. The physical movements of plants, for the most part, exists in a different time-space, one that is difficult to witness during regular human observation-time. To see the circumnutations of plants one must set up a technical apparatus to record their growth over long periods of human-time. The artwork consists of an installation of the analogue drawing technique that Darwin used (glass plates, a small bead fixed to the plant and ink) to trace the growth of seedlings and the movement of plants prior to photographic time-laspse. In another series of plants, I replace the bead with a tiny LED light (developed from work with wearables – the LED is 2mm - attached to conductive thread which will not affect the movement of the plants) and use digital time-lapse. The plant movement drawings and time-lapse video are projected into the installation space and simultaneously become the source for a dance-movement composition and a visual array of light, color and gesture. A library of related music (for plants and people) will accompany the installation.