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National Security Garden Shannon C. McMullen | Fabian Winkler  Climate, energy, agriculture, national security. These issues of critical contemporary concern are embodied in one ubiquitous plant: the soybean. Yet, despite its growing significance, the soybean remains largely invisible to consumers in the US and EU. National Security Garden is a series of art installations based on critical gardening strategies in which we mobilize soybeans to address global implications of food production and national security in a post-surplus world. With this project we hope to place soybeans more vividly in the cultural imaginary of visitors by providing a form and experience that can question how biotechnological and monocultural agriculture shape, reject or revise ideas of national/homelands security and farming in globally networked context. Gardens, Machines and Power Gardens are both material culture and ideological expressions. They are meaningful sites that “have important tales to tell about human societies,” especially about relations between art, nature and technology. For example, in European gardens created in the 16th and 17th century, mechanical devices and automatons accompanied rocks, water, animals and plants to imitate and eventually overcome the laws of nature using a mechanical worldview. In his essay Curiosities and Marvels of the sixteenth-Century Garden, Luigi Zangherie illustrates many of these ‘miraculous inventions’.i The ‘miracles’ of today’s agricultural ‘inventions’ are less visible and have been engineered on a molecular level by changing genetic codes. In the case of soybeans, code modifications support genes that

not only positively influence plant growth and oil content, but also plant resistance against unfavorable climatic events and pesticides. Formal gardens, such as Versailles, have also been sites that intertwine national politics and technological power. As Chandra Mukerji demonstrates, technological and aesthetic strategies used in the 17th century to create the garden of Versailles were contributed to the process of learning to see France as a territorial nation state.ii While these gardens still exist today they have become popular tourist destinations primarily for their overwhelming visual qualities. But there are also contemporary instances of how formal gardens can link the identity of a geopolitical region with horticultural displays – although often in a different context and less ideologically charged. One such example is the annual German Bundesgartenschau. The first Bundesgartenschau took place in 1951 with the aim of reviving areas that were heavily damaged during World War II and to create an atmosphere of national optimism and creativity in post-war Germany. iii Today these garden exhibitions have developed into showcase exhibitions for a whole region, featuring not only local plant varieties and horticultural displays but also technological displays, information about ecology, regional food specialties as well as art and architecture exhibits. Fields also express a combination of (controlled) nature and technology, but have a stronger connection to the marketplace—to profit and labor in capitalist societies. In the US, the power to shape content and form is not so much in the hands of kings or national politicians, as it is in the hands of international/global corporations like Monsanto, Bayer, Dow etc. The biochemical, biotechnological logic of agriculture can produce bountiful yields, but what about the huge emissions of greenhouse gases in the process of growing the crops and the

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unpredictable side effects of huge genetically engineered monocultures for the natural environment and human health, some of which Michael Pollan discusses in open letter to US President Barack Obama: “Farmer in Chief”: “But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases”.iv Aesthetically National Security Garden reflects on the implications of economic, technological, political, military power through a hybrid between an agricultural field (represented by the genetically modified crops) and a formal garden (aesthetic arrangements of plants and technology). Whereas formal gardens and the German national garden exhibitions usually accommodate and showcase a diversity of plant varieties, the National Security Garden follows the agricultural-industrial model of a monoculture representing the strategies behind genetically modified plants that expressly do not allow for variation or diversity. By relocating a singular crop plant into a garden form, we want to provoke thought about the contemporary ‘machine in the garden’ as did Leo Marx with this apt metaphor in his insightful discussion of the continuing tension between nature and technology in the USA as industrialization was reshaping both the American idea of home and agricultural practices.v As the industrial era has given way to a post-industrial, biotechnological era, what kind of nature and politics underlie the new machines in the garden?

Conceptually, the National Security Garden thus becomes a site of discursive intervention—while the project is certainly political, it avoids taking sides, being neither propaganda, nor partisan activism. Rather it tries to create a social and discursive space for debate, discussion and reflection. Fields of Concern, Gardens of Control In the contemporary period, the links between agriculture, politics and national security/technology have gained even more importance in light of global climate change, which is already altering the methods and geographical regions of farming. For example, Jack Hedin’s contribution to the New York Times, “An Almanac of Extreme Weather” on November 27, 2010 claims that climate change may eventually pose an existential threat to the Midwest farmers’ way of life. vi Otto Doering, director of Purdue’s Climate Research Center predicts that Indiana’s climate in the year 2100 would be like Virginia in the winter and like Oklahoma in the summer, an approximate increase of 20-25°F). Precipitation levels would become more erratic with fewer but stronger storms during the growing season.vii Already, Burkhard Schulz, a professor of plant physiology at Purdue University has been planting his experimental corn crops two days later each year for the last 5 years because of changing weather patterns that affect soil conditions. Issues like these were the starting point for a recent study by the Pew Charitable Trusts, titled The Pew Project on National Security, Energy and Climate. In the 2010 report “Reenergizing America’s Defense: How the Armed Forces are Stepping Forward to Combat Climate Change and Improve the U.S. Energy Posture,” the project description clearly connects

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security, nature and technology: “This project brings together scientists and military experts to examine new strategies for responding to consequences of climate change and potential impacts on our national security, increasing our energy independence and preserving our nation’s natural resources.”viii At the international level, the United Nations has also recognized the potential for world conflict, based on possible food shortages resulting from of a rising number of disasters and predicted shortages in food production for a growing world population. Michal Pollan warns in his letter to President Obama: “Rich or poor, countries struggling with soaring food prices are being forcibly reminded that food is a national-security issue.“ix A recent discussion of adding units of ‘green helmet’ troops to UN forces is an expression of just how high the level concern has become. Farmers’ Almanacs In our research for this project, we have become increasingly interested in farmers’ almanacs– listing valuable information for farmers (such as favorable times for spreading seeds, harvest, fertilization) based on astronomical events, e.g. moon phases, sunrise or sunset. Almanacs represent an alternative source of knowledge, a competing epistemological approach to that of the industrial-agricultural complex. Still available in the 21st century, the almanac goes back to times of pre-industrial agriculture and some of its content seems to be in direct opposition to the mindset behind scientifically engineered crops. Information from almanacs in contrast to biotech companies creates a space of debate to question both where we have been and where are we are going with our practices of farming and food policy. When high yield is not the only priority what kind of knowledge is the most beneficial?

The National Security Garden initiates these types of alternative discourses that provide, if not a challenge to the biotech system, at least a space for critique and diversity of method that symbolizes a more diversified, localized (culturally speaking) approach to farming.

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Description of the individual components of the National Security Garden (1) National Security Garden The National Security Garden is a hybrid form combining elements of agricultural fields and representational gardens. In late May 2012, the interdisciplinary artist duo, Shannon McMullen and Fabian Winkler will install a 200 square foot designed field of soybean plants in front of the City Hall of Singen/Htwl. in southern Germany. At night 1500 solar-powered magenta LED grow lights will illuminate and support the growth the soybean plants from the ground up with energy harvested during the day. This lighting design can be seen as both a utopian contribution to Michael Pollan’s idea of “sun farming” and as a critical reflection on the limits and possible pitfalls of technological interventions in the natural environment.

National Security Garden (Test in Indiana), Summer 2011.

Exploded view of the soy field in Singen/Htwl.

Computer simulation, National Security Garden, Singen/Htwl.

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(2) Tactical Garden This component oft he National Security Garden consists of a field of 96 identical lasercut white soybean plants in the trifoliate stage of their development. The canopy of soybean leaves forms a projection screen for kinetic camouflage patterns updating in realtime in response to the changing environment surrounding the installation. A Processing program reads the dominant colors of a live video feed in the gallery. As the gallery environment changes through differing lighting conditions and the movement of visitors through the space, the program will pick up the four most dominant colors in the space and use them to color the disruptive camouflage pattern projected onto the soybean plants. Traditionally, these patterns – derived and abstracted from nature – are used to camouflage human-made structures. In our work, they are used conceptually: the computer system that creates and colors the camouflage patterns attempts to make the model of the soybean plants – a representation of engineered nature – blend in with its environment. In doing so however, the computer system turns the model of the soybean field into a strange hybrid, somewhere between a representation of an agricultural field, an architectural structure, and a military artifact. According to a 2011 report1), the UN may supplement their troops of Blue Helmets with a special forces that would wear green helmets. Green would signify their special assignment to ensure food security – an issue the UN takes as a very serious threat to peace in the face of climate change and a growing world population. Imagine your rooftop garden is a resource worth killing for – how might you try to hide it? Video: http://vimeo.com/32450495 1) Goldenberg, Suzanne. UN security council to consider climate change peacekeeping. The Guardian, July 20, 2011.

Technical components of the Tactical Garden.

Tactical Garden with camouflage projection.

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(3) National Security Micro-Gardens The National Security Micro-Garden boxes are small-scale mobile multiples of the field, each featuring four soy plants in a wooden box, equipped with solar panels and LED light. They reference the tradition of flower boxes as decentralized micro-gardens that can exist almost anywhere. The portable nature of the boxes also embodies the metaphor of an idea that can travel easily initiating a public discourse wherever it goes.  

 Nomadic National Security Micro-Garden box.

Soy plants in box illuminated at night by LEDs.

Micro-garden on a window sill.

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References:                                                                                                                i  Mosser, Monique and Georges Teyssot (eds.). The History of Garden Design – The Western Tradition from Renaissance to the Present Day. London: Thames&Hudson,1991. (pp. 59-68) ii Mukerji, Chandra. Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. 1997. iii Theokas, Andrew C. Grounds for review: the garden festival in urban planning and design. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2004. (page 28) iv Pollan, Michael. “Farmer in Chief.” New York Times Magazine, October 9, 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html?pagewanted=all (accessed January 13, 2011) v Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. vi Hedin, Jack. “An Almanach of Extreme Weather.” New York Times, November 27, 2010. vii Leer, Steve. “Economist: Climate change could reshape crop agriculture.” Purdue News Room. Dec. 6, 2010. http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/research/2010/101206DoeringClimate.html (accessed January 13, 2011) viii The Pew Charitable Trusts (2010). “Reenergizing Americaʼs Defense: How the Armed Forces are Stepping Forward to Combat Climate Change and Improve the U.S. Energy Posture.” ix Pollan. “Farmer in Chief.”