PROTO

over. The Bay Area not only has this great technical culture, it also has a technological counterculture.” Technophile splinter groups with “thousands of opinions” expanded Ross’ sense of possibility.

But a fascination with technology was a long way from the kinds of biological experiments that Ross currently produces. Perhaps predictably, it was his day jobs in other professions that led him to the natural world.

“Mushroom hunting unlocked it all for me,” says Ross, who stumbled upon his obsession in the days after art school when he supported himself as a cook at a summer camp. He loved to eat, and when taken along on a hike with a

“Y_{ou can just sit and watch} fellow cook, he found that searching for his own food in the wilds th_{e grass grow and come up} offered a much different sense of nature than the alienation from it wi_{th phenomenal postula-} that he felt growing up.

“It was a way that I could also ti_{ons about the nature of life.} pay attention very critically to my environment and the subtle A _{notebook is pretty much} things going on, because it’s so high-risk: you do the wrong al_{l that Darwin had, and he} thing and you’re dead. You spend time learning about this thing or di_{d pretty well.}” find experts who you trust. Who do you trust with your life?” His interest in mushrooms led to

learning about the trees they grow alongside, and from there the expansion was infinite.

Ross changed jobs, this time to become a hospice caregiver. Grueling work, its constraints wouldn’t let him go out in the woods mushroom hunting, so he became determined to teach himself how to culture and grow them at home, reading up on scientific protocols. Though they used a different language, the protocols for mushroom growing resonated with his cooking experience. “The tools were all the same, and even the procedures: steaming, and baking, and thinking about cleanliness.” It all came down to having a recipe.

Once he realized that working in a lab was like cooking, he jumped right in and started building his own laboratory (see MAKE, Volume 07, page 102, “Home Mycology Lab”). “It wasn’t too complicated. Doing biological research is really easy. You’re dealing with biology, and it’s everywhere around you.”

Ross’ most ambitious work yet debuted in late October with Bio Technique, an exhibit that he

instinctively bash an installation. With Junior Return, comparisons with bonsai are apt, and frequently made, but what’s remarkable is how often parents project onto the work concerns about their own caregiving, or how office workers recognize a metaphor for their own highly regimented lives.

Ross wants to address those issues, and also something a little more fundamental in how we think of ourselves. “It’s thinking about how we actually form the Earth, and where we are in the waste cycle, or in the consuming cycle. It’s part of our ‘animalness’ that we don’t just own materials or solidify materials — they pass through us in specific

channels or streams. But we don’t think like that, or think of ourselves in biological terms. We think of ourselves in terms of artifacts.”

Not always, of course, and one is reminded of Buckminster Fuller’s famous proclamation, “I seem to be a verb.” Ross’ work follows up on Fuller in attempts to conjugate that verb in all its tenses. A willingness to ignore categories in favor of following what seems most interesting is something Ross seems to have picked up on the West Coast.

AFTER AN ADOLESCENCE SPENT AS A

self-proclaimed “straight-D student” in New York City, Ross moved to San Francisco to study at the San Francisco Art Institute. The Bay Area’s thriving technological experimentation was inspirational, with hotbeds of activity stretching from industrial artists like Survival Research Laboratories to corporate innovators like Xerox PARC.

“Compared to the East Coast it’s a lot easier to integrate these different worlds; people cross

28 Make: Volume 12