M - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

We never cut the blades. It eventually succumbs to
decay and death. On one level, it acts out a simple
transformation of the concrete structure, it is playful,
living, subversive. But there is a subtext to the work that
suggests the epic drama of climate change that is
unfolding before us. Some of the seed we use has been
prepared by scientists for its drought-resistant
characteristic.
What have you gained through bio-scientific
collaboration and do you see this as an ongoing
process? Your desire to arrest the ageing process
of grass addresses issues of simulation and
human intervention into processes of nature. Do
you foresee any ethical issues cropping up in this
kind of research?
It kind of became apparent to us that if a solution existed
for ‘fixing’ the grass image it lay within the field of science.
Burning with Desire is a wonderful book by Geoffrey
Batchen describing the cultural desire of the early
photographers to make a ‘transparent’ form of
representation and the impetus to ‘fix’ the transient
photographic image. So, we have thought and read quite
a lot about why and how photography came about, and
the implications of placing ‘value’ onto the fixed image.
Our approach to scientists Professor Howard
Thomas and Dr. Helen Ougham at IGER early in 1997
was in response to an article in the New Scientist journal
describing their pioneering work into a strain of grass
that did not senesce in the usual way and lose its green
colour when under stress. The colour green is volatile
and the chlorophyll molecule even more, so this staygreen
grass held out some kind of promise to our
enquiry about how to stabilise the loss of image. The
working relationship was very insightful and symbiotic.
The subtlety and range of tonal colour captured in the
grass photographs made a deep impression on our
science colleagues, and with a remarkable shift in
perception they realised that observations of plant
material could occur in very different circumstances to
the established investigative paths. Leaves ground up and
subjected to various separation was the conventional
scientific way of analysing the molecular make up of plant
material. The irony of observing processes of life through
dead material had been an accepted collusion of
established method and material. The potential of
investigating molecular indices of leaf death through a
non-invasive high-resolution imaging technique arose in
2000 with a Pioneer Art and Science award from the
National Endowment of Science, Technology and Art 11.
Using digital cameras able to resolve minute differences
on a grey scale at many orders of magnitude greater than
the human eye, the IGER team has pioneered a
technique for searching out and recording the hidden
information that emerges when all parts of the colour
spectrum of light reflected from plants are examined.
This approach draws on tools used in remote satellite
sensing, producing hyperspectral images of colour
influencing in turn the artistic vision of a grass
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photograph. The ethics of genetic engineering remains a
hot topic. It should be noted that the grass we used
supplied by the scientists was originally a naturally
occurring mutant. They scientifically observed and
adapted it from fescue grass to rye-grass using traditional
tools of plant husbandry a la Mendel. We’ve had great
opportunities to show our work across Europe and
internationally, and discuss the crossing of the cultural
divide between art and science. Our collaboration with
IGER has been symbiotic and we have in turn influenced
each other’s practice.
Professor Howard Thomas mentioned that our
collaboration has had a direct influence on the culture of
IGER and stated that some of the new directions for
IGER research would never have been undertaken
without our artistic presence. There has been quite a
strong media profile for art and science initiatives in the
UK in the last few years, and the work of IGER has
received more press through our working together than
it thought possible, or would have done without our
interaction, and when funding for research institutes is
hard won, ‘profile’ means something. It has been argued
at times that artists gain more from crossing the cultural
divide between art and science than scientists do, but we
buck that trend. We still email and keep contact although
there is no on-going research project.
Your recent research suggests an aspiration for
the image to endure for longer than is ‘natural’ -
in some ways denying its inherent transience. Is
there an element of nostalgia, or melancholia in
this?
There is a curious displacement of loss in our work. The
negative image can be literally brought ‘back to life’
through the biochemical conjuring of light and energy
conversion. It is a resurrection of a lost moment and the
vitality of the living grass suggests all that is life-enhancing
about the subject, but is subject inevitably to change. As
much as we pursue some kind of ‘life after death’ for the
grass photograph, it is equally powerful and poetic to
witness an image visibly fading from view. It arouses all
sorts of emotions to do with possession, attachment, loss
and memory.
We cannot recall the exact moment when we
first articulated this desire to hold the image by trying to
‘fix’ it, although conceptually we can rationalise the move
to preserve it for longer by saying that it follows through
the established process of photography of exposing,
developing and then fixing the image. The historian
Malcolm Andrews says the widespread use of the word
‘fix’ at the time of the early photographers indicates “a
predatory, acquisitive instinct,” a “figurative sense of
appropriation” that “leads in one direction to landscape
as a commodity.” At the same time, he suggests, such
terms represent a prevailing need to give “stability to
new experiences.” Time passes and things change – we
see that as a pragmatic fact of life. We recognise that
with the photographs we had a desire to hold onto