Thirty years ago digirati used to tell us technology would rescue us. Cities would become obsolete. We’d telecommute across field and tundra in our pajamas. We’d have trees again because we wouldn’t need paper. Industry would levitate above the land, transact in the atmosphere, so that flora and fauna would be resurrected.

Near Zuma, I frequented a nude beach over a bluff nearly impossible to climb until crews installed a paved road and sidewalk. In the Okefenokee I canoed among charred cypress stumps. Along the Chattahoochee I clambered over rocks covered in stinking sludge. At Talbot, I summered in a driftwood hut on a half mile of beach between a nuclear power plant and a walled resort community. On the shore of Lake Ontario I strained to hear even a single insect, while pan-sized fish emerged sideways and then slowly sank again into the grey water.  

My studio/lab, 40 acres in Texas, is surrounded by “development,” a noxious acid eating through green places that are later named for what’s gone (“Wolf Run,” “Ocelot Hollow”). It’s a small island in an ocean of bulldozers and fracking rigs. This is a place nobody else wants: flash floods, ice storms, droughts, and cyclones are frequent and frightening.

The work of artists James Turrell, Robert Smithson, and Donald Judd encourage us to experience the earth differently — the turning of the planet; a salt lake’s cyclic response to a deposit of form; one’s own scale swallowed in vast West Texas. Cognizant of the increasing fragility and scarcity of land, I began to investigate ways to create earth art while leaving the smallest possible footprint. Knowledge from researchers in diverse disciplines such as geophysics, entomology, and biology inform questions. I’m interested in how flora and fauna redirect their energies to accommodate change: sea cows who’ve found a warm winter spot beneath sewage treatment plants; hawks who’ve built nesting sites on balconies overlooking Central Park; seals who sun on San Francisco docks; burrowing owls who’ve discovered storm drain tunnels in freeway medians. Their environment is more porous than ours.

A company developing “smart dust”— minuscule, networked spyware devices — claims that by the next century it will build a global nervous system. I decided to create a local nervous system, one that might reveal subtle interconnections among flora, fauna, and phenomena in this landscape. The artwork is experimental. A simple rule: whatever happens here is part of the art. Works that result are set out to view, like small bonfires to attract a passing vessel. 

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