Sabrina Raaf: The Grower

The Grower is a small ‘vehicle’ that moves around the sides of a room, hugging the walls responding to carbon dioxide levels in the air by actually drawing lines of varying height on the walls. The Grower is used in public exhibition spaces, so the number of people in the exhibit have an immediate effect on the CO2 sensor–the more people, the more C02, the higher the lines drawn. At the end of the trip around the room, the height of the ‘grass-like’ drawings directly relates to the human activity in the space. The designer Sabrina Raaf, a new media artist and teacher at the Columbia College, Chicago, says “This piece makes visible how art institutions depend on their visitors to make them a ‘healthy’ space for new art to evolve, and flourish within. It’s not only an interesting project from the visual side, but exposes a deeper issue about peoples support of the arts.