Welcome Home, Pioneer

surplus motors, recycled bicycle drive trains,
scrap aluminum, borrowed electronics,
tumbleweed
2007

"Welcome Home, Pioneer" is a collaborative installation by Stuart O. Anderson and Shaun Slifer. It was constructed for the "Mechanosphere" at the Three Rivers Arts Festival Gallery in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

In 1877, the first report of tumbleweed growing wild in North America was made in Bon Homme County, South Dakota. It is believed that the seeds arrived in the United States accidentally, mixed with flax sown by Ukrainian farmers. The tumbleweed's rapid spread west was due to its unique mode of propagation. When its seeds reach maturity, a specialized layer of cells at the base of the plant dies. This allows the bush to separate from its deep taproot and roll across barren soil, propelled by the wind. As it travels, up to a quarter million seeds are released. In its original habitat, tumbleweed was constrained by mountainous geography and dense forests. However, farmers west of the Ohio River paved the way for the tumbleweed as they cleared the tall plains grasses for single-crop agriculture. This re-engineering of the landscape allowed the plants to travel great distances and provided space for the fast germinating bush to grow. By 1903, the plant could be found as far west as the Pacific coast. To this day, the United States Department of Agriculture lists it as a "Noxious Weed".

We focused on tumbleweed because of its history on the American frontier, its symbolic role in our culture, and the technical challenges presented by it physical structure.

The plant's opportunistic historical role in the resettlement of North America by European immigrants became significant in two ways. First, it was likely one of the first invasive species our agricultural ancestors became aware of, although native populations must surely have registered its introduction almost immediately - a reflection of the radically divergent technologies these cultures used to survive on the plains. Second, as a quiet indicator of the environmentally destructive agricultural practices that would follow it into our present age of industrial agriculture, the plant heralds the inability of these practices to represent or acknowledge the complexity of the ecological systems they operate within. Archaeologists believe that tumbleweeds have always followed agricultural peoples as they cleared new lands, making the tumbleweed one of the oldest members of the ever growing class of non-domesticated cultural-genetic commensalists.

In contemporary culture, the plant is present in Hollywood Westerns where it is has become, for many, the prototypical flora of the old west. Here, the plant's presence often acts as a footnote to suggest that an area has been wasted - this town, once thriving, is now deserted as its inhabitants have either died or continued West along the expanding American Frontier. This "ghost town" symbolism becomes more compelling in light of documentation showing that tumbleweeds were among the first plants to return to the soil of America's nuclear testing grounds. The image serves us both as a playful suggestion that the space the tumbleweed occupies is, in its own way, a ghost town, and, when placed next to our wall text that summarized the tumbleweed's identity as an invasive species, it provides an example of a dominant narrative becoming more real than the history it fails to tell.

The challenge presented by the tumbleweed's physical structure forced us to develop practices based on intuition, experience, and craft, rather than analysis and description. During our early development we tested the piece using a 6cm sphere with a known mass and moment of inertia controlled by an optimal linear quadratic regulator derived from a parameterized model of the system, a typical method in applied robotics. Placing the physical tumbleweed at the heart of this complex technological system presented a challenge to these traditional engineering practices. Because these practices are based on constructing, understanding, and controlling symbolic models of natural systems, the unmodeled structure of the tumbleweed makes traditional methods difficult, if not impossible, to apply. The final software was developed through an extended process of testing, altering, and observing, without making an effort to develop an explicit model of the tumbleweed's behavior. As a result, the unpredictable motion of the tumbleweed leads to emergent pattens in the system's behavior that are unique to each tumbleweed specimen, and that change as the plant disintegrates.

These three aspects - historical, cultural, and physical - made the tumbleweed a compelling choice for the central component of our piece.

Although this is our first collaborative artwork, it is not the first time we have worked together to build a mechanical system. Within the non-hierarchical collective structure of Pittsburgh's Free Ride bicycle recycling project, we have been building bicycles and other devices since 2004. We use bicycles for transportation on a daily basis, and advocate these elegant and graceful machines as an appropriate and sustainable urban transit technology. When we designed "Welcome Home, Pioneer" in the Fall of 2006, we chose a bicycle's drive-train as an immediately appropriate design for the bearings and chain drives on our sculpture. Rather than mimic the design of a bicycle with commercial parts, or custom machining our own specifically for "Pioneer", we recycled drive-trains from used bicycles. Throughout our design and fabrication process, we used recycled, surplus, found, scrap, or borrowed materials. Incrementally adapting the physical structure of the piece to the available resources is analogous to the process of incrementally adapting the software to the tumbleweed's behavior. In both cases, we decline to construct a description of the piece or its behavior before it exists, focusing instead on the value of the result rather than our ability to control its creation.

These are exciting times to be an engineer or an artist. Traditional modes of understanding and control, based on the discipline and power of symbolic models, have proven unable to resolve the complexity of problems at the frontiers of robotics, biology, agriculture, social organization, and media. The failures of symbolic artificial intelligence, systems science, industrial agriculture, medical care, hierarchical systems of social organizing, and broadcast media are all now being met with new technologies. These nascent solutions are developing in machine learning, statistical genomics, local organic farming, complementary and alternative medicine, horizontalidad in South and Central America, and web based social content creation. They all point to a shift in how we approach the unknown and complex on a global scale. The role of descriptive, defining language in technological practice, and the diverse impacts of those practices, underlies these new technologies and is manifest in "Welcome Home, Pioneer".

Technical and space requirements for installation:

The system assembles with bolts from pieces suitable for shipment in padded crates. A space at least 3 meters square bordered by one or two walls is required for the installation. The ceiling height must be at least 2.4 meters, although a lower ceiling can be accommodated if we are given at least 3 weeks advance notice before shipment to procure the appropriate optics. We require a controlled light environment in the near infrared spectrum - in particular, halogen lights, or other "hot" lights should not reflect on the piece, nor should it be placed where light from uncovered windows will shine directly on the piece. 60Hz 120V AC power is required for operation of the power supplies and computer. The piece can run unattended for an indefinite period of time.