Interactive Art: Grow It!

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Window Farm installation at Eyebeam

Artists Britta Riley and Rebecca Bray are hard at work discovering creative, city friendly, and most importantly, artistic ways for you to practice your environmentalism. Their latest project, called Window Farms, and is an ongoing experiment in designing functional and beautiful ways to grow food in your apartment/house/loft window using only materials available in your recycling bin and the local hardware store. The current prototype (as seen in the image above) is a “suspended, hydroponic, modular, low-energy” model, which promises to grow you a “high-yield edible food gardens built using low-impact or recycled local materials.” That’s right, Britta and Rebecca have designed a way for you to get a high-yield edible food garden and a zany, mad-scientist apartment decorating theme in one fell swoop.

Britta installing Window Farm at Eyebeam.

The artistic duo believe in harnessing the power of the web and modern technology to promote small scale environmental initiatives and make heavy use of the Internet in all of their endeavors. Trusting in the power of DIY ideology, or as they call it “Research and Develop it Yourself (R&D-I-Y)”, Britta and Rebecca have used crowdsourcing to find ways to adapt scientific breakthroughs into practical, every-day solutions to some of our countries most pressing — and systematic — problems such as sustainable agriculture, transportation, and waste management.

Installation view of Window Farms in a New York apartment.

Their most infamous past project was a DIY KIT that provided consumers with the tools to recycle their urine as plant fertilizer. Though the kits are no longer for sale — apparently making this chemical process accessible to laymen has some legal implications — the kits were recently on display at MoMA during an Earth Day sustainable art exhibition.

A prototype for Window Farms is currently on display in the window of Eyebeam in New York. To learn more about the project and how to make your own window farm, check out the step-by-step instructions and videos on their website.

Related post: Fritz Haeg’s Edible Estates