ASPB EDUCATION FORUM

The exhibit invites viewers to compare Un-still Life videos to traditional still life paintings.

Roger Hangarter’s sLowlife Moves Steadily Forward

It’s fascinating stuff—the slow, liquidy unfurling, swaying, and reaching of plants as they delicately dance to their own life rhythms. These beautiful, botanical actions captured on film by Roger Hangarter form the foundation of sLowlife, recipient of the ASPB 2004 Grant Awards Program (GAP). Roger, in collaboration with others, has created an artistic yet accurate portrayal of an array of plant activity in his multimodal sLowlife plant science outreach exhibit.

sLowlife is an educational art installation that uses video, live plants, photographic prints, and interactive environments to draw the viewer into the steadily mesmerizing life activities of plants. Centered on a series of time-lapse movies, the exhibit conveys that plants are complex and vitally alive; they are not inanimate objects. This choreographed experience gives humans auditory and visual access to the unhurried chronology of plants. Such a unique combination of data and art intrigues and even awes both scientists and nonscientists with the mystery of plants in their environment.

An ASPB Education Foundation GAP award of $30,000 was the initial source of funding for Roger’s sLowlife exhibit. He was subsequently awarded a combined amount more than 10 times the GAP award to fully develop and present sLowlife at nationally prominent exhibition sites. Sponsors of the sLowlife exhibit, in addition to GAP, include the National Science Foundation, the Chicago Botanic Garden, the U.S. Botanic Garden, and Indiana University. Roger’s work with current Foundation board member Christine Flanagan of the U.S. Botanic Garden helped open access to public venues for plant science education for ASPB. Included are such beautiful venues as the U.S. Botanic Garden and the Chicago Botanic Garden. To date, sLowlife has been installed at the following locations:

• U.S. Botanic Garden, Washington, DC
  November 1, 2005–March 26, 2006
• Museum of the Earth, Ithaca, New York
  December 23, 2006–April 1, 2007
• Chicago Botanic Garden, Glencoe, Illinois
  June 23–October 21, 2007

Roger delivered a lecture about sLowlife entitled “Communicating an Awareness of Plants Through Science and Art” at the Chicago Botanic Garden on October 14, 2007. He also was invited to give a public lecture at the 2007 Chicago Humanities Festival (http://www.chfestival.org/). The festival, entitled The Climate of Concern, addresses various environmental issues. Roger’s presentation explains the plant awareness concepts that are at the core of sLowlife.

Many images from sLowlife also are incorporated into David Salt’s Genomics eXplorer exhibit, an interactive walk-through model of a plant cell. Genomics eXplorer was most recently displayed at the Indiana State Fair in August.

A variety of ancillary programs based on sLowlife have been developed. Although these programs are not directly connected to the exhibit, Roger uses knowledge gleaned from creating sLowlife to complete aspects of these programs. For example, he included excerpts from sLowlife in several movies he presented at two Chicago art shows. One movie collection aired from March 2 to May 5, 2007, with Inflorescence, a gallery show of five artists’ work at the David Weinberg Collection (www.davidweinbergcollection.com). The same movie collection was included in an art exhibit entitled Arts Botanica at the Loyola University Chicago Museum of Art in Chicago, June 1–8, 2007.

Roger states, “It is extremely rewarding to see that my hope for reaching a broad audience with sLowlife is also resulting in other opportunities to bring plant science to the public.”

The sLowlife exhibit continues to be stewarded by the Chicago Botanic Garden. Their offices are in the process of scheduling sLowlife’s next location since it left Chicago on October 21. Interested parties can contact exhibits@chicagobotanic.org or review www.chicagobotanic.org/exhibits for information about scheduling sLowlife at a venue. More information and teaching resources also can be found at Roger’s website, http://www.bio.indiana.edu/~hangarterlab/.

Katie Engen
katie@aspb.org