The Virtual Pasture

Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio
Spring 2009 – autumn 2011

Because good farmers rotate crops, in spring 2009, I converted The Beanfield (2006-08) into pasture. Sheep and cows once grazed the OSU campus grounds and horses pulled delivery wagons to classrooms, auditoriums and dormitories. Now— except for pigeons, squirrels, rats, cats, raccoons, and dogs—animals are mostly absent here. The Virtual Pasture reanimated the central-campus landscape with a flock of Shetland sheep raised on an off-site farm but presented through images streamed live to a 4 x 6 foot video monitor placed outside the Wexner Center for the Arts.* The project entertains such questions as, Where do we encounter farm animals now? And, How might we reestablish contact with those living creatures on whom we depend but have made invisible in our daily life? 

Why look at animals?

[Because] the eyes of an animal when they consider a man are attentive and wary. He does not reserve a special look for a man. But by no other species except man will an animal’s look be recognized as familiar. The animal scrutinizes him across the narrow abyss of non-comprehension. This is why man can surprise the animal. Yet the animal—even if domesticated—can also surprise the man.

John Berger, About Looking, 1980

*NOTE: The Stratford Ecological Center, in Delaware County, Ohio, provided a home to my Shetland flock. On the first Monday of each month, I transported three to five sheep from the farm to the pasture at the Wexner Center site on the OSU campus.

Related reading
Local Practice: An Agri/Cultural Consideration, by Michael Mercil in Edible Columbus, Summer 2010   
What I Forgot to Say, unpublished notes by Michael Mercil, October 2011