Ingesting Infinity
An intricately beaded, oversized romanesco vegetable grows on the playa providing a sizable visual and interactive experience of nature’s golden ratio - the Fibonacci sequence manifest in an ordinary garden vegetable.
The Installation
From afar, a romanesco vegetable illuminates against the ‘barren’ playa backdrop. Up close, participants admire the intricate beading and detailed fractal patterns of the veggie flesh. This oversized romanesco grows up from a large wood platform. Resting on a stalk of wood and steel, the beaded romanesco is nestled in large brassica leaves made from steel, fabric, and beads that provide a shaded sanctuary for the platform underneath. The fractal dome of the veggie flesh is made from intricately wired beads of different shapes, sizes and colors. The fractal dome is internally supported by 5 steel arms that form a circular armature. A hole near the stalk provides entry to the center of the romanesco where 1 participant can sit in an intimate space and admire nature’s golden ratio from within.
Mission & Philosophy
Our mission is to create interactive art that viewers can get up-close and personal with, relate to, and engage with physically and mentally. We want viewers to walk around it, lay underneath, touch it, get inside, and not only contemplate the philosophical questions that arise, but imagine how it was created and how they might do it differently. This piece is not behind a glass case, but accessible and textural. It comes to life with the personal and shared experiences viewers have with it.
Installing an intricately-beaded and oversized romanesco on the playa, we hope to create a sizable oasis of nature’s Fibonacci sequence, aka the golden ratio or divine proportion. We want to magnify and physically illustrate the mathematical beauty of nature’s building blocks, evolutionary process, and foundation of our universe in an object we normally take for granted and think superficially about. Additionally, we aim to create something visually beautiful that also inspires challenging questions around how we relate to food, food politics, privilege, and the inequitable structure of our social system - what is the role of privilege in eating vegetables? does the viewer recognize romanesco? who has regular access to this vegetable? When we look at the romanesco’s fractal patterning, we are invited to contemplate the scale of the golden spiral - where do we see it around us? From the unfolding fern to spiral galaxies, this pattern is a building block of our universe.