Evolutionary Yarns in Seahorse Valley: Fabricating Marine Endangerment

• In Event: Collecting the Sea

Abstract

The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef is a distributed venture of around three thousand craftspeople who are cooperatively fabricating simulations of marine organisms and evolutionary theories out of yarn and plastic. They do so to draw attention to the menace climate change poses to the Great Barrier and other reefs. The project first took shape in 2005 when Margaret Wertheim, a science writer, discerned that mathematical models crocheted by geometer Daina Taimina evoked the morphologies of the Great Barrier Reef.

This paper reports on the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef as a single instance of “fabricated biology,” which I construe as being about hooking together knowing and making. For the makers of the Reef, fabrication is a mode of improvisational and speculative, materially engaged craftwork, a constructive grappling with biological things apprehended via their manufacture. I think a new sort of engagement with biology may be in the making for Reef contributors, one that is about apprehending biological form not just materially, but processually, in and through its making. One consequence of such a process-oriented grasp of biology is that Reef contributors construe biology as itself a process (specifically, an evolutionary one) that, like crafting, tends to be changeable, error-prone, unpredictable, and risky. The resulting Reef is an artifact -- a culturally meaningful material thing -- that embeds scientific and folk theories about marine biology. Further, manufacturing such forms renders biology something whose evolutionary unfoldings are not only mimicked, but also analogically generated, through an ad hoc crafting of new crochet forms.

Author

• Sophia Roosth, Harvard