Ken Rinaldo & Amy Youngs: Artist Talk & 3-day workshop

Anthropogenic Stalagmites
Ken Rinaldo and Amy Youngs
from Ohio State University
February 2019

The workshop will consist of looking at inventing and building flow-through systems, that involve animals. insects and machines as digesters. Plants as digesters and bio-remediators through hyperaccumulation and oxygen C02 breath exchanges. Worms as digesters and inoculators in eating waste, sterilizing soil and passing fertilizer. Humans as remediators in both creating and recycling plastic waste and consumer junk. Discarded goods will be used in the creation of vertical gardens. Peristaltic pumps and Arduino timing circuits will be used with grow lights, LEDs and buttons. Some fungi such as Glomus mosseae and plants can function as hyper accumulators and can absorb heavy metals, solvents and hydrocarbons. Some moss will be used to test the health of environments as a hyper accumulators and we will research and implement what is at hand including epiphytes and local flora and fauna.

This workshop is about living systems, though also caring for and reusing plastics which are entering our environments through water and soil. Plastic debris are found everywhere, from the Arctic to Antarctica. clogging street drains in our cities and littering our national parks and river flows with runoff plastic. It is now common in the world’s oceans, with an estimated 270,000 tons of plastic floating through the world’s seas where it threatens 700 marine species with its presence. This workshop will offer one solution, with vertical gardens housing plants such as aridopsis and spider plants both hyperaccumlators, that absorb and remediate hydrocarbon, chemical and metal waste streams.

The workshop will consist of looking at precedents like the digestive systems of humans with of folks like Wim DelVoy’s Cloaca , Natalie Jerimenkenko’ s work, Mel Chin’s revival field, Agnes Denis Wheatfield, Helen and Newton Harrison and Rinaldo and Youngs' recent work the Machine Garden commissioned by the University of Maine and the Farm Fountain commissioned by the Te Papa Museum in New Zealand.

This event was co-sponsored by SoCA and INCUBATOR Lab.

Image Credits:

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Anthropogenic Stalagmites
Ken Rinaldo and Amy Youngs
from Ohio State University