Playground

Playground
(2014)

Found branches, wire, fabric, yarn, thread, styrene pipe, plastic ferret tubes.

Documentation of Rats' First Trip to the Playground

(2014)
Digital video

Playground was a sculptural exercise in understanding the species-specific sensory capacities of rats - an explorable habitat for creatures who primarily process the world through somatosensory (touch) input from their whiskers. Varying textures, planes, strands, and unexpected passageways are integrated into the sculpture to appeal haptically to rats’ sensitive whiskers, which are specially adapted for collecting spatial information. The cool color palette of the piece is dictated the particulars of rodent vision: rats are dichromats - their eyes only encode the wavelengths of colored light that we see as greens and blues.