I have always been fascinated by the work of Natalie Jeremijenko. She is an artist whose background includes studies in biochemistry, physics, neuroscience and precision engineering.

Lately she has been working on installations and projects to make people aware of their ecological footprints. One of her projects I reviewed in the past was OneTrees: a great deal of cloned trees. She planted them in the SF area. Because of their genetic similarities, their differences in growth can be attributed to the different levels of CO2 to which they are exposed. Therefore she thought of using the trees as CO2 sensors.

More recently she worked on the Feral Robots project, an Open Source robotics project providing resources and support for upgrading the raison d’etre of commercially available robotic dog toys. Because the dogs follow concentration gradients of the contaminants they are equipped to sniff, their release renders information legible to diverse participants, provides the opportunity for evidence driven discussion, and facilitates public participation in environmental monitoring and remediation.