OK. I feel like I started this string of posts airdropped, as I was, in the middle with very little context. I won’t say the fog has cleared, but I do have some more thoughts to add. As I posted in July, I’m starting a new project in Portland Oregon. It’s a result of a multi-year Research Fellowship through the Pacific Northwest College of Art‘s Collaborative Design program. I am very grateful to the MFACD Chair, Peter Schoonmaker, Animated Arts’ Rose Bond,  Academic Dean Mark Takiguchi, and Provost Greg Ware. I’m the guinea pig Research Fellow, and looking forward to it.

It is now week 3, time is flying it’s summer, it’s beautiful, people are away or slower, and so I have also had to slow down.

I’ve started several resource spaces to keep track of work in addition to this blog:
PDX maps
PDX history, geology and terroir
Soil Microorganisms
flickr

My premise is to make entirely new work, adopt new methods, work more closely with science advisors, and get to know a particular place over a much longer period of time than I am normally able. The rubric for this is to re-invest/ investigate the notion of Terroir. As I have been writing a lot of letters to possible mentors and contacts, I have been trying to refine what I mean, way in advance of any sure thoughts on the subject or my own output.

I’m posting this excerpt of a letter I wrote to a soil superstar in case anyone has any suggestions!

In short, I am  starting work  on a long-term project that focuses on Portland’s shoreline and waterway uses,  as a way to explore local/global connections, and a variety of communities, both human and non-human.

I am keen to learn more about microbial soil communities, and their connection to larger systems of “terroir” (I would like to see that word applied to more than wine and fine commodity products). My current strategies include clay harvesting, and getting intimate with how soil works; I have many questions that are difficult for a lay person to access; information tends to be directed either to the gardener who needs to know a basic and general sense of soil composition, or to the professional and academic, which is very detailed and granular.

So here are my questions.

I’m looking for a soil biologist, preferably in the Portland area,  who’d be interested and game to work with me on soil sampling, microvideography, and who has expertise they are wiling to share. I am not a pest or a flake in the least, I promise, and I absorb information pretty well.

The kinds of primary inquiries I am interested in knowing more about have to do with:

— the question of whether microbes can be/are speciated (I recently read that the tiny ones are not here), and how that impacts their study and status, so to speak.

— how site-specific are organismic communities? Do local and global factors have effect on specific communities?

I also want to map the northern end of Portland’s shoreline – its uses and abuses seem to range from wetland to swimming hole to superfund site to golf course to airport to speedway to houseboat enclave to recreational park to, of course, the Port of Portland.