Transient patchiness: the slippery territories of groWorld

Life becomes the theme, the tool, the implementation protocol and the final result of contemporary bio-artistic endeavours. Inexorably diverse and unorthodox life, grown from the desire to explore the unknown, similar to speculative inquiry in the fundamental sciences. Mongrels spawn from the amalgamation of 'things that are grown' with 'things that are built', resulting in 'things that are built that grow things that are grown'. Growth underlies both biological life and economic progress, being a focus of many emerging sciences, technologies and art forms. Different approaches to growth (cyclical, linear, accelerated, chaotic, slow, smooth) influence the outcomes of human activity and the impact of the activities on the world in which they are embedded. As an artistic concept, growth is opposed to the notions of artworks as finished products, that can be exhibited and sold for aesthetic enjoyment. Growth implies an element of wilderness, of the untamed and the uncontrollable, of a continuous process responsive to the conditions of its surroundings. The GroWorld initiative germinated from a fascination with the robustness and diversity of things that can be grown. It is a broad project, trying to encompass many points of view on the way ‘life’ is treated in different economies, sciences, arts and politics. It also attempts to situate all developments in local situations, looking at interactions within particular ecological habitats, as well as the points of contact between diverse habitats, in order to bring to attention the benefits of gradually grown trans-local diversity as opposed to industrially engineered global monoculturalism. The life that groWorld seeks is the substance that grows through the cracks in dissimilar, extreme and potentially hostile environments such as de-activated urban spaces, ecologically (or otherwise) polluted areas (think of the Chernobyl "involuntary wildlife park"), bottoms of oceans and volcanic fluxes.