ARTIST STATEMENT: Robin Vuchnich
Immersive Experience
As an artist engaging with Thoreau’s digitized herbarium, I find it conceptually significant that the artifacts I am working with are virtual, digitized representations of what was present, tangible, and alive when Thoreau walked through the woods. Through immersive visual interpretations of his herbarium, visualizations of the collected plant data, and soundscapes recorded at Walden Pond, we can imagine and appreciate the extraordinary abundance, beauty and diversity that he encountered. If Thoreau were alive today, he might point us back to our present reality— that nearly half of these plants (indicated in cyan) are now declining towards local extinction as we approach a time when they may only be seen in museums, pressed and preserved, or digitized. These are the digital ghosts of the landscape Thoreau revered and documented, a landscape so transformed by climate change, that he would not recognize it.
Title: “This Is and No Mistake”
““Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance . . . till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake.”
— Henry David Thoreau
Above Image: "This is and No Mistake" — Robin Vuchnich © 2022
My conceptual framework for the immersive experience was to leverage plant data and the digitized collection to provide visual evidence of the impact of climate change on species in the collection while also presenting the digital artifacts as objects of beauty, digital afterlife, and contemplation. I collaborated with scientist Emily Meineke who guided me in the reading and synthesis of the scientific data collected by Chuck Davis and his collaborators. Together, we identified potential stories in that data to visualize.
The animations also feature the species in most severe decline performing in a kind of digital afterlife in a fashion that asks viewers to contemplate their beauty and loss. A spatial augmented reality floor projection, evocative of a pond, transitions through several flowering species that appear to momentarily hydrate and rebloom from their herbarium sheets. A soundscape recorded at Walden Pond further immerses visitors in local birdsong, the lapping of the pond, insects chirping, and the sounds of footsteps traversing the woods.
27% Locally Extinct, 36% in Decline*
What stood out to me as a most devastating and sobering reality was the dramatic decline in abundance and local extinction of over half of the species that Thoreau collected. I envisioned and prototyped this as a grid that presents the entire herbarium in one view at life size — using dark blue to color code the declining species and gradually darken the images in sets organized by the data on severity of decline.
*Willis, C.G., Ruhfel, B.R., Primack, R.B., Miller-Rushing, A.J., and Davis, C.C. (2008). Phylogenetic patterns of species loss in Thoreau's woods are driven by climate change. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 105, 17029-17033. PDF
