Day and Night

When we are far from a city, we say, “we are in the middle of nowhere”, even when we are is amidst the teeming, infinite diversity of nature. Our self-focus limits our understanding of the vastness of the natural world. I am now setting a daily reminder, so as not to forget that the bees, bugs, plants, trees, fungi, and fauna of all sorts, are at the center of their worlds; our “nowhere” is their “in the center of it all.” In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll noted that every animal exists in its own unique perceptual world — an idiosyncratic and complex environment of sights, smells, sounds and textures that it can sense but that other species might not. These stimuli defined what von Uexküll called the Umwelt.  We too are part of this mysterious, majestic world. When we divorce ourselves from nature and live sealed off form light and air and dirt and wet, we are less. My installation, Day and Night is a digital reminder of the complex breath of the Umwelt.