ARTIST STATEMENT: Robin Vuchnich

“The Memory of a Season” — Immersive and Interactive art

This immersive experience presents Henry David Thoreau’s herbarium in a life-sized, illuminated grid of 648 images. In collaboration with Professor Emily Meineke, Robin Vuchnich developed this data visualization using research from scientists tracking species decline in Concord, Massachusetts. If Thoreau walked the woods today, he would encounter a profoundly altered landscape with more than half the species he collected now declining toward local extinction. Specimens rendered in dark blue represent the 27% locally extinct and 36% declining species.

An interactive wall features flowering species in severe decline around Walden Pond. As visitors move across a virtual body of water at the gallery’s center, flowers levitating over a forest floor respond to human presence. When left undisturbed, the flowers gradually grow in size and number, moving towards the viewer before fading out. These flowers are the “the digital ghosts of the landscape” of Walden Pond.

Vuchnich found examples of living flowers by contacting local wildflower nurseries and through the iNautralist app—a crowdsourced citizen science platform and image database. Vuchnich recorded video and soundscape elements at Walden pond.

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 visualizations of the collected plant data and soundscapes recorded at Walden Pond, we can imagine and appreciate the extraordinary 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. Once revered and documented by Thoreau, this a place so transformed by diminishing biodiversity that he might not recognize it.

— Artist: Robin Vuchnich

Above Image: An immersive data visualization of Thoreau's Herbarium

Vuchnich's 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. Vuchnich collaborated with scientist Emily Meineke who guided the reading and synthesis of scientific data collected by Chuck Davis and a team of collaborators. Vuchnich and Meineke identified potential stories in the data to visualize.

Vuchnich also developed a generative and interactive "flower wall" featuring flowering species in most severe decline — performing in a kind of generative digital afterlife that prompts 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.

Artist: Robin Vuchnich 2022

What stood out to Vuchnich 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. She envisioned and prototyped this as a patchwork 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

A new collaboration with a Local Lens

Above Image: Herbaria North Caroliniana

The artists created this digital mosaic with plant specimens from NC State’s vascular plant herbarium that were collected in North Carolina between the late nineteenth century and the early 2010s. These plant and pollinator specimens are retouched and reimagined as a mirrored mosaic with symmetrical patterns that are reminiscent of stained glass or art nouveau textile traditions. Pollinating insects from NC State’s extensive research collection appear alongside herbarium specimens of the plants they seek for sustenance and, in the process, help to perpetuate. The mosaic creates a light-filled pass-through to the living landscape sitting just outside this window in the Gregg Museum’s pollinator garden, in which you can encounter varieties of all of the plants used in this collage.

Photographs of insect specimens were taken at the NC State Insect Museum collection, with curatorial guidance from Hannah Levenson, Gareth Powell, and Kyle Schnepp.

Artists: Robin Vuchnich and Marsha Gordon

Created in 2025

Trying to visualize extinction in a fashion that bends time, our exhibition provides an encounter with permanent loss while also offering an aesthetic appreciation of these plants, even as they exist only in their pressed, desiccated state on the pages of Thoreau’s specimen collection.

For a traveling exhibition, the floor and wall animations can be customized for indoor or outdoor installations and scaled up or down to fit spaces. We hope to partner with museums and galleries that have large spaces suitable for large scale, fully immersive, experiences and floor to ceiling projection and interactive possibilities. We also see the potential for visualizing other stories present in the data and further developing the intellectual take-aways from this experience.