student Research

FDA at Home

Pearl Ho

FDA (Food Diagnostic Activism) at Home is a technology for detecting the presence of pesticides in food. A custom software application repurposes an affordable desktop computing technology into a highly specified piece of lab equipment. A spectrophotometer can be found in nearly every biology and chemistry lab and is used to measure wavelengths of light of samples. This technology, which is normally completely inaccessible to a layperson, is necessary in order to test for chemicals in food.  The project includes three components: public testings, gallery demonstration, and website with free software, results database, and instructions to set up a food diagnostics lab.

Project Plant

Shadi Shariat

The commodification of our food as well as the promotion of chemically processed and genetically altered products have disconnected us from the “real” sources of our food, and have limited our options for more natural and healthier alternatives. This problem is even more so emphasized in lower-income communities where not only access to healthy and organic food is a luxury, but also access to online resources and information for alternative food production is limited. This project aims to make inquiries into these obvious discrepencies. Its goal is to empower such communities to resist the hegemony of our food industry to grow into a more independent and self-sustained entity by providing access to relevant information using new media technologies (such as RFID and the Internet). It demonstrates how community members can establish a new and direct channel of communication for the flow of information to further utilize such knowledge and create a more sustainable and autonomous community. The Morningside Elementary School is the starting ground for spreading awareness of this much needed change.

Fly with implanted webserver

Garnet Hertz

Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon, Canada
Installation Date: June 1 to September 3rd, 2001

Fly sets up a “double blind” - both participant and viewer are unaware of each other except through the mindless blinking of LEDs. “It” is indeed alive- but what manner of life is pure speculation? Do the blinking LEDs indicate a transformation of perception; are we somehow made “larger” by our inhabitation of the fly’s body? Tele-theory seeks to dissolve time, space, and scale to create a feeling of “equidistance of everyone from everyone else, and from each of us to any world event.”

Our approximation and abstraction of reality becomes indiscernible as technology continues to mediate our everyday experience. Tele-presence art, however, attempts to be less concerned with the technological feat than with the breaking down of unidirectional communication structures distinguishing both visual arts and mass media. Within the installation, Fly, the utopian rhetoric invested within the notion of telepresence is ultimately usurped by the ultra-trite, supra-insignificant act of possession.

Ironically, Hertz critiques techno-messianism by offering us tantalising techno-gimmerickery - leaving our engagement with the fly a sour residue of triviality.