The Artist Who Talks With the Fishes

Original story by by Jonah Weiner, New York Times

Four years ago, the Australian-born artist Natalie Jeremijenko stood at the edge of Pier 35 in Downtown Manhattan, trying to start a conversation with some striped bass. Just north of the Manhattan Bridge, she and several collaborators dropped 16 tall buoys into the East River. The buoys were fitted with submersible sensors that monitored water quality and with LEDs that flashed when fish swam by, charting the Piscean passage. “I fell into the river four times installing it,” Jeremijenko recalls. “You have no idea, just standing on land, how ferocious those currents are!”

The installation, “Amphibious Architecture,” devised with the architect David Benjamin, stayed in the river for several months — a miniature skyline bobbing and blinking in the reflected glare of the real thing. With the piece, Jeremijenko was interested, she said, in “highlighting what’s under this pretty reflective surface that enhances real estate value but is actually a diverse, teeming habitat.” Viewers on land alerted to the presence of fish could send them text messages care of an SMS number. The fish then “responded” with texts of their own, chatting about themselves and their surroundings: “Hey there! There are 11 of us, and it’s pretty nice down here. I mean, Dissolved oxygen is higher than last week. . . .”

At New York University, where she is a professor of visual art, Jeremijenko had developed seaweed bars containing a PCB-chelating agent that observers were encouraged to hurl into the river — food meant to help rid the fish, and by extension, the water, of toxins. This snack was formulated to taste “delicious” to fish and humans alike: if you were feeling peckish, you could have what they were having. “It’s a very visceral way of demonstrating that we share the same natural resources, we eat the same stuff,” she once explained. “They’re not inhabiting a different world.”

Much of Jeremijenko’s work reimagines environmentalism as a kind of open-ended game. She likes to frame ecological arguments not in the common conservationist language of interdiction — consume less, reduce your food miles, lose those incandescent bulbs — but rather as overtures to more engaged and imaginative participation. “A lot of my work concerns a crisis of agency — what can we do?” she says. Her art, which has appeared at the Museum of Modern Art, two Whitney Biennials, the Guggenheim and her New York gallery, Postmasters, can take the shape of fanciful provocations, prototypes for functioning systems or, as often as not, both. The idea, she says, is to design interfaces or write scripts that will “facilitate interactions between humans and nonhumans.”

On a recent morning, Jeremijenko was at her Greenwich Village apartment, busily preparing a new installation for the East River. Out in the hallway, affixed to her front door, was an oversize postcard depicting Jesus Christ astride a smiling brontosaurus. “My son decided that should be there,” Jeremijenko said, letting me in. Papers and books covered nearly every horizontal surface; clothing and exercise equipment lay scattered across the floor. A Yorkshire terrier named Wuppy hopped around, yipping as he alternately licked my fingers and bit my ankles. There was no kitchen, just a small refrigerator and a wheeled counter in the living room’s far corner. “This was originally a two-bedroom apartment,” Jeremijenko said. “I put up a bookshelf to divide it, and my oldest daughter lives on the other side. She got the part with the kitchen.” (In addition to her elder daughter, who is 26, Jeremijenko has two adolescent children from her marriage to the sociologist Dalton Conley: a girl, 15, and a boy, 13, who spend time here and with their father.) In the bathroom was a dish rack laden with china, and silverware was perched above the toilet; a spoon encrusted with dry oatmeal sat in the sink near some toothbrushes and a bottle of dish soap. “I used to have a lovely Chelsea loft — then I got divorced,” Jeremijenko said wryly.

Jeremijenko was plotting another interspecies congress, to be installed at Pier 35. As part of the $160 million East River Waterfront Esplanade development project, which is scheduled to be completed in 2015, “Amphibious Architecture” was set to return permanently to Manhattan, this time in a massive, 100-buoy iteration. At the Esplanade’s northernmost section, which will be known as the EcoPark, Jeremijenko and Benjamin were also installing a newer piece called “Mussel Choir”: a glee club of bivalves that, with the aid of sensors and audio software, would “sing” about the quality of the water as they filtered it. Shown first at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, the piece took on an added topicality after Hurricane Sandy, the ruinous effects of which may have been worsened by the depletion of bivalves along the city’s shorelines. (Jeremijenko also wanted to mount several “public toilets for pigeons” at the EcoPark, but powers on high declined that part of the proposal.)

In sharp contrast to the disarray of her apartment, Jeremijenko, who is 46 and resembles the actress Julie Delpy, was dressed smartly in a slim gray topcoat, skinny black pleather pants and black ankle boots, her blond hair in a bun. Inviting me to push aside some papers and sit on her couch, she hopscotched between tasks on a laptop, booking us a Zipcar to get over to the East River while Skyping with her boyfriend, the architect and artist Usman Haque, who was at the London home they share. “Remember, you need to be at the doctor in an hour,” Haque told Jeremijenko, a delicate note of exasperation in his voice. “Otherwise you won’t be able to see him for weeks. O.K.?” The flip side of Jeremijenko’s wide-angle thinking is that more-quotidian details — keeping doctor’s appointments, say, or remembering her purse when she leaves the house — can slip between the cracks. “I know, love, I know,” she replied, stuffing three large coils of rope and a box cutter into a shoulder bag.

Though her art has been shown around the world — she was flying to The Hague later that day to open a group show at the Gemeentemuseum that included her work — Jeremijenko trained first as a scientist. She holds bachelor’s degrees in biochemistry and physics, earned a Ph.D. in computer science and electrical engineering and began, but did not complete, doctorates in neuroscience, philosophy of science and mechanical engineering, the last one at Stanford. While living in the Bay Area, she fell in with a local leftist activist community and expanded a collective named the Bureau of Inverse Technology she helped start in Melbourne. Her career in science gave way to making art that reflected her academic pedigree. In one early work, she installed a motion-capture device near the Golden Gate Bridge to tally suicide jumps. The police kept records, but Jeremijenko wondered if some still went untracked.

Jeremijenko describes what she does as a kind of systems design — “ ‘artist’ is a strange and often uncomfortable title, but it’s useful,” she says — and her most compelling pieces are meant to function beyond gallery walls. In this sense, she is part of a conceptual-art tradition that stretches back to Robert Smithson, Gordon Matta-Clark and the eco-art duo of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, whose interventions in urban and natural landscapes were both sculptures and ways of engaging with social or environmental issues. In 2007, for example, Jeremijenko transformed the area around a number of Manhattan’s fire hydrants into tiny parks with an assortment of flowers, grasses and mosses excellent at absorbing road-borne pollutants and storm-water runoff. On a practical level, the parks beautified “dead” street space and helped defend the city estuary. On a metaphorical level, they invited viewers to think about less visible, though no less urgent, catastrophes than fire. (And if firefighters needed to trample the parks, they would regenerate over time. Jeremijenko has approached the Department of Transportation to pitch these so-called “NoParks” as a permanent outdoor feature.) For another collaborative project, part of a 2010 retrospective at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, N.Y., she served dinner guests a vegan marshmallow cocktail containing j. lividum, a bacterium that helps frogs to defend against the devastating chytrid fungus — people were encouraged to eat some fluff and kiss some frogs. In 1992, the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija did something similar, famously turning a New York gallery into a Thai curry joint, but Jeremijenko’s meal was both more whimsical and more pointed, meant to inspire what she has called an eco-mindshift.

Jeremijenko is a savvy packager of complicated ideas; many of her projects would fit nicely on a PBS children’s show. In 2003, when she was teaching in the engineering department at Yale, she collaborated with high-school students in the Bronx to install chemical sensors in toy robot dogs, setting the pack loose near an old Con Edison plant close to the Bronx River to sniff out underground pollutants. “I’m interested in creating spectacles,” she says.

We left her apartment building to fetch the Zipcar, a Mazda hatchback parked in an underground garage. Taking the driver’s seat, Jeremijenko started the ignition and nudged the gas pedal, but the transmission was in reverse, and our rear bumper slammed into the Audi parked behind us. Jeremijenko swore, glanced back to make sure there was no damage (somehow there wasn’t), then headed off with the parking brake still engaged.

At the river, Jeremijenko drove past a DO NOT ENTER sign into a lot full of garbage trucks: Department of Sanitation property. At Pier 35, we parked the car and climbed beneath the metal fencing surrounding the EcoPark’s future mussel-habitat: 30 enormous concrete blocks made in upstate New York by Ken Smith, a landscape architect, that were then studded with hundreds of smaller rocks and installed here in an inset cove. Jeremijenko had permission to enter, but nobody was around to challenge us anyway.

“The tide is really high!” she said as cloudy water sloshed over the blocks. In the completed installation of “Mussel Choir,” magnets and Hall-effect sensors, transducers that respond to changes in a magnetic field, will be glued to the mussels’ shells. Factors like depth of submersion and the mussels’ openings and closings (which correspond to water quality) will be represented, via software, by acoustic phenomena like pitch and tempo. She mused, half seriously, about complementing the choir with occasional “laser light shows,” à la Pink Floyd.

Above us, an enormous metal cylinder dangled from the elevated F.D.R. Drive, hanging implausibly by a single steel cable. The cylinder was part of a lamp, knocked loose from the highway by Sandy, that the Esplanade construction team could not take down, Jeremijenko explained, because it was technically in the D.O.T.’s purview. (The lamp has since been removed.) Sandy’s devastation spotlighted the need, she said, to rethink how we develop urban waterfronts, and “to go to soft and compliant infrastructures — something that absorbs, and that improves water quality — as opposed to the naval-architecture approach, which is to build things heavy and immovable and blunt.” She hates the vogue for transforming shorelines into concrete pedestrian malls and bike paths: “It horrifies me. It is the exact opposite of what we need.”

Jeremijenko suddenly jumped off the pier’s southernmost lip, landing on a weathered wooden walkway below. She withdrew the three coils of rope and used the box cutter to cut a roughly 20-foot length from each coil. She tied one end of each rope to a different pylon and cast the other end into the river. The ropes were made from both natural and artificial fibers. “It’s early in the mussel spawning season, so their spat is floating around everywhere; this is a little experiment to see which sorts of materials they’re drawn to,” Jeremijenko said. “My primary interest is in the mussels’ spectacular adaptability. That puts me in a different class from traditional conservationism. I’m interested in how organisms adapt to the Anthropocene” — the era of human activity on earth — “as opposed to the Sierra Club ‘conserve and preserve’ way of thinking.”

The drone of car engines bore down mightily and continuously from the highway, a Brooklyn-bound D train clattered over the bridge and the fleet of garbage trucks shone bright in the late-morning sun. “Preserve what?” she said.

The daughter of a physician father and schoolteacher mother, Jeremijenko grew up in the coastal Australian city Brisbane, with nine siblings. An overachieving, Tenenbaum-ish brood, her brothers and sisters have worked as politicians, academics, coal miners, pilots, professional footballers and movie stuntmen. Natalie has collaborated on projects with several of them, and she integrates her creative activity with her personal life in other, more radical, ways — in a sly affront to “you can’t have it all,” she has delivered lectures while breast-feeding. “Experimenting with your own life is the most fundamental medium we have,” she told me.

Jeremijenko’s experimental streak extended to the naming of her kids. Her oldest daughter is Mister Jamba-Djang Vladimir Ulysses Hope (Jamba for short); her daughter with Conley is E (what “E” stands for is up to E, but so far she has decided to stick with the initial); and their son is Yo Xing Heyno Augustus Eisner Alexander Weiser Knuckles. “I had wanted to give our boy an ethnically ambiguous name to challenge assumptions about race and assimilation,” Conley wrote in a 2010 essay. “For all the Asian-American Howards out there, shouldn’t there be a light-haired, blue-eyed white kid named Yo Xing?”

For a spell, Jeremijenko got around, even indoors, on Rollerblades, which reflected her fascination with “alternate forms of urban mobility.” In her ideal metropolis, more people would commute by zip-line; in 2011, she and Haque installed a temporary system in downtown Toronto, which riders navigated with a large pair of wings, and she is now hoping to take it to the Bronx.

After Jeremijenko’s doctor’s appointment, she headed to the Lower East Side Ecology Center, a community organization that works out of an old boathouse in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge. Jeremijenko wanted to partner with the center to produce a series of workshops and events, rather than installing a series of placards at the EcoPark explaining, say, the environmental and nutritional benefits of mussel farming — an approach she dismissed as deadeningly didactic. She sat at a conference table opposite the group’s education director, a dreadlocked guy named Daniel Tainow, and one of its founders, Christine Datz-Romero, who wore a fisherman’s sweater and a polka-dot ascot. Several cats lay about the office, including one that Datz-Romero rescued from the East River in the late 1990s using rope and a milk crate.

The goal was to sketch out a grant proposal that the Ecology Center could submit to City Councilwoman Margaret Chin, in whose district Pier 35 falls. One of Jeremijenko’s ideas was to host a barbecue in which people could turn junk mail and other cellulosic waste into soil-enhancing biochar while dancing to a salsa D.J. — Jeremijenko is a self-described “salsa head,” and she thought the music might help attract the Lower East Side’s Hispanic residents. Another idea was to hold a culinary event in which people would eat locally harvested mussels and drink “edible cocktails” derived from algae and “dusted with carbon.” (Jeremijenko kept vegetarian for years but finally decided that simple dietary restrictions don’t line up with “how the world works”; she points to crocodile farming as a fantastically sustainable practice: “You get food, you preserve and create wetlands and you sell the leather to Gucci.”)

Datz-Romero seemed to like the suggestions. “We’ve tried to propose environmental education to Chin before, and they didn’t fund it,” she said. “This may be a more fun way to do it.”

“So what are we talking about?” Jeremijenko asked. “Five events for, what, $1,500 each?”

Datz-Romero grimaced. “That’s actually a little high,” she replied. “The entire grant will probably be, at most, around $3,000 for the fiscal year.”

Jeremijenko pursed her lips and nodded. She has the imagination of a think tank, the agenda of a nonprofit and the infrastructure of neither. In order to implement her ideas, she relies heavily on municipal programs, community organizations and the support of academic and art-world institutions. (At N.Y.U. she runs something called the Environmental Health Clinic, where anyone can make an appointment to discuss ways to remedy health hazards like airborne pollutants and storm-water runoff. She has had hundreds of meetings; one project turned cotton candy, a summer treat, into a more nutritious snack, using isomalt, a sugar substitute, edible flowers and high-protein bee pollen.)

But Jeremijenko has also begun experimenting with ideas for the free market, and one in particular seems ripe for some eco-minded venture capitalist to champion. She wants to encourage the production of water-buffalo-milk ice cream, which, in addition to being marvelously creamy, she says, would encourage the creation of much-needed wetlands, on which water buffalo graze. About a year ago, she says, she gave an informal presentation to representatives of Unilever, which owns Ben & Jerry’s, where she flaunted her fluency in “the topography and runoff issues affecting Vermont farmers” and showed mock labels she designed for the delicacy. Next, she plans to approach the company’s marketing department, hoping to leverage “the image of Ben & Jerry’s as a progressive, socially conscious brand,” she said.

The project is both an ambitious entrepreneurial undertaking and an artwork about how food connects us to the world. In its playfulness and complexity, it recalls “Food,” the functioning-restaurant-as-performance-piece that Gordon Matta-Clark helped found in SoHo in 1971, featuring a proto-locavore menu and — between the open kitchen, affordable pricing and dining room meant to double as a community center — utopian aims. Jeremijenko calls her ice-cream business plan “pursuable and feasible, if difficult.” Even if it goes nowhere, she said, she’ll happily display documentation of the effort, and its failure, in some future exhibition. “It’s a hopeful representation,” Jeremijenko explained. “If people recognize it and say, Yes, there are opportunities to hack food systems, and the project uses the cultural medium of food products to reveal how Unilever works, I’d call it a success.”

The Ecology Center meeting ended around 4 o’clock, and Jeremijenko hailed a cab home. She needed to pack for the airport, though she wasn’t exactly sure when her flight was. E was coming to Europe, too, but she wasn’t at the apartment when Jeremijenko returned at 4:30, and she wasn’t answering her phone. Skype was open on Jeremijenko’s computer, and Haque’s head popped into the frame. “You’re still there?” he asked. “Your plane leaves in two hours!”

Jeremijenko located E at Conley’s apartment, hastily stuffed clothes into a yellow hard-shell suitcase and called a car service. As we waited downstairs, Wuppy trotted around us on the sidewalk. A woman walking her own dog approached with a scandalized air. “Could you please leash your dog?” she asked. Jeremijenko shifted herself out of the woman’s path, and Wuppy followed. The woman was unsatisfied. “It’s not just for me,” she said. “A car could hit your dog.”

Jeremijenko ignored the woman until she moved along. “He doesn’t need a leash — leashes are for people’s benefit, not dogs,” Jeremijenko told me. A mischievous gleam flashed in her eyes, and she added, “When other dog walkers see me, I send them into a panic!”

When we arrived at Conley’s building, he assumed custody of Wuppy and handed off E, who was wearing beat-up Converse sneakers with no socks, a vintage slip as a dress and a red duffle coat. She’d barely settled in before a crisis erupted. Jeremijenko said she packed E’s pet sugar-glider — a bug-eyed marsupial native to Australia — so that he could accompany them to Europe, but now Jeremijenko couldn’t remember where she’d put him.

“Mom, you can’t do things like that!” E cried. “Do you understand that you can’t not know where he is?” They rifled through Jeremijenko’s bags.

“He’s safe; I thought he was here, but he’s fine,” Jeremijenko said.

“Why did you even bring him?” E protested. “He’s my pet.”

“I thought you might like to spend time with him,” Jeremijenko said.

“That was a bad idea,” E replied, fuming. She began talking in pained tones about a brain-damaged rat that a laboratory gave to Jeremijenko a couple of years ago, and that E had lovingly adopted — “then you lost her, and she died!” E said.

“We don’t know that,” Jeremijenko said. “She may have lived happily ever after.”

Jeremijenko called Jamba, who found the sugar glider safe and sound at home. E’s anger subsided. Jeremijenko noted proudly that E, a ninth grader, had enrolled in an N.Y.U. creative-writing workshop and received an A for the semester. When E learned that I was profiling Jeremijenko, she said, not without affection: “I’ve never met anyone like my mom. So good luck.”

The traffic was grisly, and we were still on the Van Wyck at 6:15. The plane was a goner. When we arrived at J.F.K. 10 minutes later, Jeremijenko realized that she had no money for the fare. “Sir, is there an A.T.M. at the airport?” she asked the driver. “Ay!” he replied, grumbling in Spanish. Jeremijenko put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “I know, I’m sorry,” she said, which made him smile. A sign directed us to a bank branch off the main road, and we pulled into the parking lot.

“Mom,” E asked, “when is our flight?”

“Very soon, darling,” Jeremijenko replied, and she ran across the asphalt to get some cash.