Convoluta

My good friend and colleague, Martin Greaves, of dinosaurmuseum.com Illustration & Design and author of Exhausted Renegade Elephant has written this amazing piece for my blog - cheers mate!

"I find your latest concept beautiful, poetic even. As a natural phenomena, the wind has not made such an impact on the art and poetry of mankind as, say, the sun, the moon, fire or water, the forests and trees, the animals; and yet it could be argued that our very future, the future of the planet lies in its hands. Wind is a form of solar energy. Winds are caused by the uneven heating of the atmosphere by the sun, the irregularities of the earth's surface, and rotation of the earth. Wind flow patterns are modified by the earth's terrain, bodies of water, and vegetation. Humans use this wind flow, or motion energy, for many purposes: sailing, flying a kite, and even generating electricity.

The terms wind energy or wind power describe the process by which the wind is used to generate mechanical power or electricity. Wind turbines convert the kinetic energy in the wind into mechanical power. This mechanical power can be used for specific tasks (such as grinding grain or pumping water) or a generator can convert this mechanical power into electricity. So how do wind turbines make electricity? Simply stated, a wind turbine works the opposite of a fan. Instead of using electricity to make wind, like a fan, wind turbines use wind to make electricity. The wind turns the blades, which spin a shaft, which connects to a generator and makes electricity.

I like to think that such a concept as wind turbines can be seen as the whirligig writ large! Reading your proposal, Steve, and thinking about your new project has attuned me to a new way of thinking about turbine-generated power. For when someone switches on their light in a household powered by electricity from a wind turbine, is not that light a direct result of the activity of wind power in a distant location, harnessed and transferred to your home? Now whilst I realise that this is not the exact purpose of your project, it has shown how your idea and your new work-in-progress has directly led me to look at something that is relatively common in a new and exciting way, which is traditionally the aim of any form of artistic expression worth its name. Your proposal seeks quite beautifully to transpose the soft blowing of a natural breeze in a distant field directly into a city gallery, in real time, through your automated whirligigs. This alone is worth the price of admission, and as an artist I can appreciate the lovingly crafted pieces of folk-art through which you seek to demonstrate your ideas. It is a combination of craft and idea, and the poetic nature of your concept that I really appreciate myself, it is one that speaks to me directly.

To finish, I'd like to quote an anecdote from Rachel Carson's 1961 essay "The Sea Around Us". It concerns the movement of the tides and their effect on a marine worm, the Convoluta roscoffenisis, a creature found in northern Brittany and the Channel Islands. In an abstract way, I think it kind of echoes your experiments with wind automota and shares that aura of the poetic. It highlights the idea of the actions of one distant natural force having a tangible significant effect in another, completely different environment, one that is far away from the original source.

Convoluta has entered into a remarkable partnership with a green alga, who's cells inhabit the body of the worm and lend its tissue their own green colour. The worms have become so dependent upon the plant for means of nutrition that they must enable the algal cells inside them to carry on their function of photosynthesis, which is dependent on sunlight. Therefore, Convoluta rises from the damp sands of the intertidal zone as soon as the tide has ebbed, the sand becoming spotted with large green patches composed of thousands of worms. For several hours while the tide is out, the worms lie thus in the sun, and the plants manufacture their starches and sugars; but when the tide returns, the worms must again sink into the sand to avoid being washed away, out into the deep water. So the whole lifetime of the worm is a succession of movements conditioned by the stages of the tide - upwards into sunshine on the ebb, back downward on the flood.

What I find most unforgettable about Convoluta is this: sometimes it happens that a marine biologist, wishing to study some related problem, will transfer a whole colony of the worms into the laboratory, there to establish them in an aquarium, where there are no tides. But twice a day Convoluta rises out of the sand on the bottom of the aquarium, into the light of the sun. And twice each day it sinks again into the sand. Without a brain, or what we would call a memory, or even any clear perception, Convoluta continues to live out its life in this alien place, remembering, in every fibre of its small green body, the tidal rhythm of the distant sea.