Robin Vuchnich: In Search of Thoreau's Flowers—The Memory of a Season

The nineteenth-century philosopher Henry David Thoreau has long been celebrated for his profound essays on subjects ranging from natural history to social justice. In his most prominent work, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854), Thoreau meditates on the transcendent experience of living in direct communion with nature. Throughout his life, Thoreau collected many species of plants from the region around Concord, Massachusetts, the site of Walden Pond. Today, his herbarium of dried and pressed specimens is housed at the Harvard University Herbaria.

New-media artist Robin Vuchnich draws inspiration from Thoreau to create interactive, light-based installations that bring to life her own interest in environmental stewardship and diminishing biodiversity. To create the first part of her installation In Search of Thoreau's Flowers, Vuchnich drew from the Harvard collection to compose a virtual projected grid of pressed plants. This data visualization is color coded to reveal research from scientists tracking species decline in Concord, Massachusetts. If Thoreau walked those woods today, he would encounter a profoundly altered landscape: more than half of the species he collected are now declining toward local extinction. 

In Massachusetts as around the world, such loss is attributable to—and in some cases, hastened by—human activity and neglect. Vuchnich's installation also features an immersive projection of floral species in decline around Walden Pond. A field of colorful flowers covers three walls of the gallery, nearly surrounding the viewer with stunning beauty and sensory abundance. As viewers move across the gallery, a sensor picks up their movement, which instantly affects, disrupts, or alters the fields of flowers on the walls. The metaphor is clear—whether we can see it or not, human presence changes nature. When the viewer stops moving, the fields of flowers return to full glory.