The beauty of art is that it transforms the information into an experience. Provides us a new way to look at things and question. Natalie Jeremijenko best at what she is doing. She seems blends engineering, environment, and art to create an experience that otherwise we might not have. And, her every performance is consciously crafted for social change. I’m fascinated by her works.
At NYU, where is she is a professor, she is running an environment clinic, as a doctor would run a medical clinic. Instead of the patient, she calls her visitors impatient, someone who can wait for the government to make a difference for them. She realizes major diseases of today including cancer is the result of the environment.
Among her works that inspired me, one is “Despondency Index” which she created in 2003 as part of the Bureau of Inverse Technology (BIT). She installed a motion detector camera on the Bay Bridge in San Francisco, recorded suicides, and graphed the relation of suicides to the stock market and other data.
Her Tree logic exhibition that she created at MASS MoCA is another excellent example, in which six live trees are inverted and suspended from a truss, displaying the contrived growth responses of the trees over time. When inverted trees still grew away from earth. We have a saying in Nepali, “A tiger won’t eat grass, no matter how hungry it is”. For me experiment proves the same. It may feel a simple thing, but the exhibition really gives a way to question what nature of nature is?
DR's diary 