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Lawn
mowing is a ritual of negotiating between the symbolic and literal
boundaries of the suburban landscape. Evidenced by a number of legal
disputes concerning yard maintenance across the country, collective and
private interests conflate on the front lawn, as the space is individually
owned but reflective of neighborhood property values and identity. A
‘good’ mower adheres to the standards of reasonable grass
heights, the regulating lines of mowing patterns, proper distributions of
plantings, acknowledgement of property lines, and scheduling and frequency
of the operation, etc, etc. This project attempts to revise the
instrument of lawn mowing to enable a practice that trespasses many of the
physical, temporal, and behavioral boundaries of the suburban neighborhood
for the homeowner who is interested in disturbing the order of
neighborhood.
A case in point....
The
machine crosses the following boundaries:
the lawn is mowed during the daytime,
most typically on the weekend mornings or afternoons when homeowners are
free from professional obligations. Headlights on the mower will
allow the ritual to occur at night, when some of the boundaries between
homes become less apparent or even invisible and one can move unrestrained
by the complete view of neighbors. During the night, sounds and
sights from homes spill out of their daytime frames and spread the yards
and streets with their private contents. It is a time of opportunity
for new behaviors to occur.
the subtle distinctions of grass height
and hue at the edges between homes becomes difficult or impossible to
maintain in the absence of sunlight. A lawn mowed at night will most
likely create new softer edges or transcend the boundaries between
yards. Within an individual yard, flowers and other plants are
contained in beds, separated from the mat of grass often with some kind of
liner marking the edges. A lawnmower outfitted with a seed
distributor (powered by the rotary motion of the wheels) can disturb the
territory of grass and planter by haphazardly spreading wildflowers in its
path.
a ‘good’ lawn is a
carpet-like covering of blades at a uniform height, not much more or less
than two inches tall. Tilting the blade will create variation in
grass heights within a single pass of the mower.
homeowners are constantly fighting off
the vestiges of wildlife that threaten to spoil a perfect lawnscape.
Distributing birdseed will beckon the creatures that are typically
prohibited from the grass.
the mower usually maintains a vacant
expression, concentrating on the chore and labor of mowing. The body
stalks right and left across the lawn, building a rational pattern of rows,
occasionally deviating from the order to negotiate trees or planters.
A flaccid lawn mowing apparatus cannot maintain the rigor of typical mowing
patterns, and the operator must find ways to move around the machine in
order to guide it over the lawn.
Some of
the effects of this misbehaving lawnmower are immediately perceived, and
others develop in the days following a mowing, as birds and squirrels are
drawn into the yard and wildflowers begin budding.
This project was advised by Krzysztof Wodiczko in
Technologies of Dissensus at MIT in the spring of 2005.
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