Life cycle of a common weed : reciprocity, anxiety and the aesthetics of noncatharsis

This document is a condensation of research into an artistic practice of transation and dialogue. Through the staging of an artwork, I offer encounters with fractured biopolitics and forms of social engagement. Written in three parts, this document may be read as separate yet interdependent components of a distributed narrative. The first section begins with a straightforward description and documentation of an artistic concept that evolved during my time at MIT. The artwork, Life Cycle of a Common Weed, is a fertile encounter between plants and humans. The material transfer of nutrients is the critical locus of this exchange: blood from a human body nourishes dandelions with nitrogen and the root and leaves of the dandelion provide nutritious and medicinal sustenance to the human. Liminally present in the exchange are pathogenic viruses and empathy. Life Cycle of a Common Weed is not an object-based artwork, and as such exists as a performance, visual documentation, an event, and a perpetual cultivation. In the second section, I describe the emergence of Life Cycle of a Common Weed from a rhizomatic web of embodied knowledges, multispecies encounters, cultural symbols and practices, dialogues and lateral transfers. I have infected the philosophical abstractions of the artist's statement genre with a situated ethnography that joins the artwork to nodes of questions and contexts, but by no means circumscribes its entire network of connectivity. The final section identifies the work of other artists as important antecedents, as well as audience encounters that provoked reflection on my approach.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Berrigan, Caitlin (Caitlin Elizabeth)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Krzysztof Wodiczko.

• Architecture.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/54201

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/54201