Bryospherical
Bryosphere – the micro-world of mosses and all the microscopic fauna that live there, including bacteria, fungi, nematodes, tardigrades, springtails.
It didn’t take long for my mammalian mind to melt thinking through this miniature ecosystem. The relationships seemed far wilder than anything humans get up to. I started keeping charts of who’s who, who eats who, who lives inside who…staring through microscopes or lenses trying to recognize movement, or to see how a drop of water is enough to totally change the colour and form of a moss leaflet: swelling instantaneously into vibrancy, revealing tiny shapes meandering over the single-cell thick surface.
Thierry (criticalgardeningcollective.org) introduced me to the idea of a ‘Fourth Nature’, as an ecology incorporating both living and man-made environments of sustained digital regulation in a symbiotic relationship. But…for that to work I would have to learn who the mosses were and what they needed.
I became preoccupied with scale. macro micro. How would it feel if we were the size of a a bacterium? Chitin structures. Intrinsically disordered proteins. rotifers. weevils. the fragility of a single cell-thick structure. I didn’t know how to begin to parse any of that out so I began by drawing prototypes…but really musings around the cartographies or energy flows (in every sense of that word,) of their structures.
1)prototype plan (orig. drawing pencil on paper, 22″x30″, 2021):
A robot-garden running on biofuel-cells, harvesting enough electricity to shake and stretch out a few times a season. As clean and slow as a glacier. In an ideal world I imagined this installed on an abandoned strip of land along a railway, something to be glimpsed by commuters, becoming weedier and more unruly by the year till it completely disintegrated or became frozen into place like the tin man when Dorothy happened upon him.
I based this on Brautigan’s 1967 poem All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace, though in my mind it was countered with Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency, (“…I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures… I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life…).

2) It didn’t take much research to realize that the kind of biofuel-cells I could build would never generate enough power to move anything. I started to sketch series of human-powered machines, obsessing on Norias (water-wheels) and bicycle-driven water pumps that would filter water across myriads of tiny unglazed ceramic channels which would create a perfect moist environment for mosses. I started collecting bicycle parts. I imagined miniature solar panels could provide back up power… until I realized how much energy it takes to produce them.










