Multimedia Expanding Art Projected to Bring Attention to Invasive Species

What plants are in your garden? Depending on your level of gardening enthusiasm, you might know most of them. But do you know which plants are not native to your home—also known as invasive species?

    Probably not, says Dr. Jacob Barney, associate professor in the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences.  But in a collaborative project with David Franusich, multimedia designer with the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT), Barney is trying to remedy that.

    Franusich and Barney’s SciArt collaboration, sparked and supported by the Center for Communicating Science with additional support from ICAT, highlights invasive species around Blacksburg and Appalachia– including on Virginia Tech’s campus. Together, Barney and Franusich find places where invasive species have been purposefully planted or are growing in and around Blacksburg. They then project art made by Franusich onto the invasive plants. They have recorded these projection sessions and plan to put them into permanent art installations at the invasive species sites for everyone to see.

    Franusich and Barney wanted to “make something that is both educational and beautiful.” Franusich’s art is generated by algorithms and includes expanding patterns that fill the screen, expressing the sometimes-rapid takeover of native ecosystems by invasive species.

    By having public art installations that call attention to invasive species, Barney and Franusich want to raise awareness that invasive plants are a widespread issue, not point a finger of blame at those who planted them. They want to use art “as a tool for awareness that then gets people interested to educate themselves and find out more,” says Franusich. While raising awareness about the species themselves, they also want to raise awareness of our role as humans in the introduction of invasive species.

    Many of these invasive plants can be bought at local garden stores and then planted in gardens and yards. These plants may look beautiful and often have cultural or personal significance, but the act of planting introduces non-native plants into the local ecosystem and can cause ecological consequences. Certain invasive species can make wildfires worse because they are more flammable than other species, and they can survive conditions like droughts that other plants cannot, which might eventually cause native species to go extinct. These consequences not only affect the local ecosystem but can also negatively affect our lives.

    If you think you’re unfamiliar with invasive species, just look around the next time you walk across campus.  One of the most easily recognizable is the maroon-leafed shrubs that make up the Virginia Tech logos on campus. Barney and Franusich want to use one of these planted logos as a site for an art projection, recording, and possible future installation. They met with Virginia Tech facilities personnel to obtain permission from the university and to make sure that university landscaping crews understood they weren’t blaming them. “They’re no more guilty than any homeowner locally,” says Barney, “or than the suppliers who sell the non-native shrubs.”

    The plants that make up the Virginia Tech logo have been chosen for obvious reasons: they are maroon and they hold their shapes. These shrubs haven’t yet been the cause of any regional invasions of the species, but that doesn’t mean they don’t hold the possibility of long- term ecological consequences. That is one of the main points of Barney and Franusich’s use of this site, in particular. They want to “show [that] the juxtaposition of many of these plants is that they are both useful and beautiful in one context, but also can be problematic and cause biodiversity issues. The same plant can live in both of those worlds,” explains Barney.

    Barney and Franusich hope that the installations they are creating now will live on into the future. The installations that they plan to create during this project are multimedia and portable, so they can be placed in different locations to engage different audiences. Barney and Franusich don’t want these installations to be short-term because these installations are “a representation of a system that will be relevant for years and decades to come,” Barney explains.

    The next time you are walking on campus and around Blacksburg, be on the lookout for invasive plants and these installations so you can learn more about them and help your local ecosystem. 

    For more about this project, see the VTX story “Intersecting science and art collaboration highlights invasive species research” and its associated video. And follow the Center for Communicating Science on Twitter (@VT_ACT) to catch the announcement of the project's upcoming campus art installation! 

By RJ Loyd, Center for Communicating Science student intern