Weather: Sunny.

There are art installations on the Diag this week, courtesy of the MLA students. Yay! Art! Distraction! Learning! Multi-disiplinary multi-media learning tools!

The following descriptions match up with the various projects (however, they will not likely match up with my photos, since Blogger and I don't get along very well).

ROOTed (front of Dana and Randall)

Jennifer Austin, Erik Dayrell, Susie Mattke-Robinson, Mary Walton

Beneath the surface, the roots of a tree provide stability, strength, and life. Were these roots visible, you would see they reach out far past the trunk of the tree, extending well beyond the canopy. They would bleed their imprint onto the ground, making clear the connection between the life of the tree, the earth around it, and our place rooted in nature. Media: Broadcloth, wire.

Dioxin Exposure! (front of Dana)

E. S. Bauer, S. M. Layton, M. S. Jastremski

Dioxin is a dangerous chemical produced primarily by waste incineration and burning coal to generate electricity. It is present to varying degrees in nearly all life on earth, humans included. Dioxin Exposure! does what its name implies; it amplifies something that is all around us, even inside us,
but that we never see. For more information on Dioxin, visit www.ejnet.org.




Wind at Work (next to Hatcher Library)

Brian Chilcott, Amy Hiipakka, Britt Olsen-Zimmerman, Joel Perkovich, Ja-Jin Wu

The Wind at Work installation is intended to reveal that clean wind power becomes a sculpture in the landscape, rather than a scar as left by traditional fossil fuel extraction. Our intention is to promote the simple beauty of these forms in a bright and joyful space.



Shrine of the Once and Future Forest (front of Tisch Hall)

Jennifer Dowdell, Dave Laclergue, Carrie Morris, Zhifang Wang

Inspired by "The Once and Future Forest" by Leslie Jones Sauer of Andropogon Associates, this shrine mourns human-induced threats to forest diversity. The project encourages consideration of the history of introduced diseases, pests, and invasive species in North America. Playing off of current concerns about the emerald ash borer and the hemlock wooly adelgid, the shrine intends to expand awareness of a long and catastrophic history of similar disturbances, and the inevitability of future epidemics if preventative policies aren't established.



Flux (front of Angell/Mason Hall)

Katherine Foo, Tao Zhang

This installation speaks to the complex energy network that lies underneath the earth. The exponential mathematical relationship of its form expresses the intrusiveness of human beings' patterns of resource use.



Highlighting Diversity (tree wrappings)

Michael Yun, Holly Zipp, Yasuhiro Ishihara, Alicia LaValle, Amy Beltemacchi

We are surrounded by the solidity and permanence of trees but their inherent familiarity can make them invisible to our eyes. Wrapping tree trunks with a simple swath of color highlights the diversity and immutability of the trees. A sequence of horizontal bands at eye level emphasizes a line on the landscape and brings unity to a space which is otherwise experienced disparately. Each color corresponds to the tree's botanical family. We hope to deliberately connect our community to the landscape with this simple act.