WORLD PREMIERE

ALEXANDRA DAISY GINSBERG AND HER

 POLLINATOR PATHMAKER

OPEN CALL

3 November 2021

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg at Eden Project

Photo by Steve Tanner

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and her Pollinator Pathmaker.

A world premiere and online since 3 November 2021 to coincide with the United Nations Climate Change Conference.

Artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg asks us to see the world through the eyes of a pollinator and begins planting living artworks around the world.

Pollinator Pathmaker is a new 55-metre living artwork exploring the vital role of pollinators, just planted at the Eden Project in Cornwall. In what is really a fitting moment next to the GOP26 in Scotland, the artist is ahead of many of the participants in her plans for climate protection. The artwork is part of the Eden Project and also tells the story of the UK's native pollinators: their important role, their current plight and their restoration.

Following the planting of the first artwork in Cornwall, more gardens will be created across the UK and Europe. The artist hopes to create the largest artwork ever created for the climate by planting living artworks for pollinators around the world in the future!

THE IDEA

Pollinators are an important part of our ecosystems. Although the threats to honeybees are widely known, they are not the only pollinators. In the UK, for example, over 250 species of bees, including 24 British bumblebee species, one native honeybee species and many species of solitary bees, play a crucial role in pollination alongside flies, beetles, wasps, moths and butterflies.

The Pollinator Pathmaker challenges visitors to look at the world from the perspective of plants and pollinators and to join an international cultural campaign to save bees and other endangered species of pollinating insects - the first of its kind. Over the past 40 years, pollinating insect numbers have declined dramatically due to habitat loss, pesticides, invasive species and climate change, and the artwork is a call to do something about it.

The artwork at the Eden Project will include a new garden designed and planted with a custom algorithm and curated plant palette for pollinator preferences.  Through the new website and algorithm pollinator.art, the public can become part of the artwork and create their own planting for bees and other insect pollinators. The website is an experiment developed in collaboration with the Google Arts and Culture Lab. Users can see a 3D visualisation of their garden on their screen, created from images of each of Ginsberg's plants. On the website, participants can also watch their digital garden change throughout the year as flowers pop up for different pollinators in an animated seasonal view. A soundscape composed by award-winning sound artist Nick Ryan accompanies the work, and the public can explore what a garden might look like through the eyes of insects.

The first international partner to create a garden will be Light Art Space, a Berlin-based arts foundation, in spring 2022, with further edition gardens to be created in 2022 - including in London in collaboration with the Serpentine. 

OPEN CALL

Everyone is invited to participate in the project, as each new international edition garden adds a new range of locally appropriate, pollinator-friendly plants to pollinator.art.

www.pollinator.art

THE ARTIST

Dr. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is an artist who explores our fraught relationship with nature and technology. In her artworks, writings and curatorial projects, Ginsberg explores topics as diverse as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, conservation and evolution, and examines the human drive to 'improve' the world. 

Ginsberg has spent more than ten years experimentally exploring the field of synthetic biology, developing new roles for artists and designers. She is the lead author of Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology's Designs on Nature (MIT Press, 2014). In 2017, she completed her doctoral research, Better by Practice, at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London, which explored how powerful dreams of a 'better' future shape the things that are designed. Ginsberg won the World Technology Award for Design in 2011, the London Design Medal for Emerging Talent in 2012 and the Dezeen Changemaker Award in 2019. Her work has twice been nominated for Designs of the Year (2011, 2015), with Designing for the Sixth Extinction being described as "romantic, dangerous.... and everything else that inspires us to change and question the world". Ginsberg exhibits internationally, including at MoMA New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, the National Museum of China, the Centre Pompidou and the Royal Academy, and her work is in museum and private collections. Her talks include TEDGlobal, PopTech, Design Indaba and New York's TechFest. Daisy lives at Somerset House Studios in London.

www.daisyginsberg.com

EDEN PROJECT

The Eden Project, owned by the Eden Trust, is a global arts, science and education charity with a social and environmental mission: to create a movement that builds relationships between people and the natural world to demonstrate the power of collaboration for the benefit of all living things. Eden champions creativity and critical thinking, presenting thoughtful and thought-provoking interdisciplinary cultural, community and educational programmes locally and in local and national communities.

www.edenproject.com

By G. 3 November 2021