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Art and Culture

Philip Ross’ art crosses the boundaries of technology and biology.

By John Alderman

Photography by Jonathan Sprague

FROM HIS STUDIO HIGH ON A HILL ABOVE SAN Francisco, artist Philip Ross has a firsthand view of the transformation, expansion, and human activity below — a window onto architecture and ecological shifts, whether they be human versus earthquake over 100 tumultuous years, or puffs of fog hydrating backyard plants on a lazy afternoon.

Within the studio are the artifacts of Ross’ own shifts, the mulchy, calcified, glassy, wooden, digital, and pulpy remains of more than a decade of artwork that straddles the border of technology and biology. Sometimes wrapped neatly, sometimes just lying on the floor, these objects map Ross’ movements along a path where aesthetic curiosity has led directly to a hacking of scientific methods.

Ross’ work explores our inescapable roots in a constantly shifting biological world. It’s a field with easy appeal: few things are as startling as life in transformation. And it’s no accident that his art overlaps with science. The notion of the Greek word techne, as Ross explains it, allows for discovering the properties of a thing not just by what it appears to be, but by what it might be, what it can be: “Both art and technology look at the world like that — not necessarily as a given but as potential, possibility, directions, alternatives.”

Ross himself is a hybrid — born in New York, transplanted to San Francisco, and not quite comfortable with any particular label. Artist, teacher, and curator, Ross is a scavenger as well as sculptor of living objects. His personal quest to engage with, and teach others with, the fundamentals of life fits perfectly with our time, when fields like biology and engineering are merging and raising questions that call for a keener sense of responsibility for where we’re taking this planet.

“My agenda is partially an education,” Ross says, at breakfast, pausing over pancakes at a rowdy

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Mission District diner. “We have to move beyond a naive ecological view of where we are situated, in that we are definitely animals and our technology is a natural part of our condition, and if we don’t figure out how to naturalize our technologies or get them in line with nature, that’s where the real problem is.”

The pieces Ross makes often place living forms in a situation where human involvement is formalized, like Junior Return, a work from 2005 that encases a plant in a blown-glass hydroponic pod, with digitized life support dialed to the absolute minimum.

The result is a stunted, live object of rarefied beauty suspended in an eerily lit, tiny stage. (Ross recently reprised this work with a batch of 18 pods, all networked together and powered by central batteries.)

The body of work is as much about process as outcome — or at least that’s where the challenge lies. For Was Below, Now Above (2002), Ross created a steel frame that he covered with very tiny oysters and submerged for two-and-a-half years, allowing a colony to form and mature.

As the day approached to raise up the steel ribbing, Ross knew that if he wasn’t careful he’d soon have a ton of rotting mollusk meat on his hands — a hazard to his piece and possibly public health as well. Finding out how to safely and quickly rid the frame of the meat was a challenge that led him to universities and museums, and finally to some not-so-salty water, where the change in salinity killed the oysters, and bacteria ate the soft tissues but not the shells, leaving stunning skeletal remains.

Then there are the reactions from viewers. While building an installation for the Exploratorium in San Francisco, Ross learned that one out of every 1,000 children is a “whacker,” or someone who will just