My name is Natalie Lusk, and I’m a second-year student at FSU pursuing dual degrees in Studio Art and Philosophy. Ultimately, I seek to discern truths about the underlying structure of the universe through my research practice, which consists of assembling materials that relate strongly to my wonders and generating ideas during the time I spend engaging with those materials. I revise these ideas with logical rigor through the iterative practice of writing about my sculptures and the ideas they come to embody. My approach to the task of understanding the universe has been informed by post-humanist ideas, and one of my initial hypotheses is that our definition of aliveness is misguided. What has been meant by that word so far is how similar a system is to the human system, but fundamentally, I posit, the universe is composed entirely of specific systems that contain, comprise, or interact with one another: there is no alive or unalive.
To investigate these ideas, I bring together disparate materials that are especially representative of the different aspects of systems that I am exploring. Thread is one of the smallest materials I can work with, so it invokes a sense of the atomic and is apt to represent the entanglement of individual parts that form unified systems. Weaving is an employment of thread that is useful for exploring numerical values and basic senses that stem from perspective like under/over or left/right.
Plant materials and imagery are vital to my practice because they are what first clued me into the fact that perceived aliveness is proportional to human similarity. We imagine that they are alive, but don’t consider them to be conscious. When they find themselves in the right conditions, they cannot help but to grow in iterative patterns unique and specific to themselves, but are still influenced by the systems around them, contributing an aspect of randomness to their physical qualities. I believe that humans are very similar in our behaviors, regardless of how much “free will” or “consciousness” we may have.
Human utilitarian objects are another material choice because they are an obvious counterexample to my thesis. It seems that a bowl or shelf is different from ourselves in important ways: they do not think, for example. However, If you were to take an atom, a molecule, or even a dead fingernail from my body, it could not think and would not be considered alive, but it nonetheless constitutes a larger “living” system that evolves through time and space.
Through the completion of my IDEA grant project, I will continue to explore shared characteristics of systems thought to be alive or unalive. I have proposed the completion of multiple sculptures that act as a location for textiles created by my hand and living plants to grow and interact with one another. The principal challenge of this project will be to design and fabricate vessels that can provide support for plant root systems and offer adequate light while also containing the necessary structures for textile fabrication, like a frame loom or mount to embroider fabric upon. Through this project, I will continue to work through contradictions in my ideas, evolving my understanding of systems closer to truth. Aspects that I am excited to spend time with include: the possibility/event of death, a system’s ability to grow independently, individual parts/fragmentation of systems, and the concepts of values and patterns.
My project is supervised by Professor Rob Duarte of the art department. One of his areas of specialty is using code in the creation of artworks, and he will assist me in bringing an aspect of code and digital fabrication to my project, which relates strongly to my questions– understanding computers as living systems is one of the ideas that constituted the beginning of posthuman thought. I gained experience using P5, a javascript library meant for artists, in his creative coding class, and I am currently investigating the language “gram” for use in my project as well as other researchers that have combined weaving and code like those at the ATLAS institute at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Much of the work on this project will take place in my studio, which has been provided by FSU through the BFA program. Here are some photographs of the space to give a sense of the place I will be working in, as well as some of my current works and experiments:
I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to conduct my research with the support of the IDEA grant and am excited to begin this project. Throughout this month, I will begin to collect plant, thread, fabric, and structural materials, as well as develop sketches to think carefully through both aesthetic and pragmatic aspects of the sculptures. I look forward to presenting the results of my material collection and visual ideation in a blog post next month.
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