Projects:Nurse Log

Description	Participatory art project: come add medications to a log. You'll see when you get here.
Has website
Persons working on
Self-organized sessions	create self-organized session
Tags	Village:Narwhal
Located at village	Village:Narwhal
Other projects... Futel 2m Foxoring Nurse Log Open Bar VAX-11 ... further results

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Nurse Log

Invitation

Come decorate pill bottles. Specifically, write the name of a medication (legal or illegal, no judgment) that has helped you on a bottle, and decorate the bottle however you’d like; we have metallic and black Sharpies, puff paints, and googly eyes. When you’ve finished:

1. Take a lid, put it on a spot on either log where you’d like to put your bottle, top down. The pins should go through the hole in the lid.
2. Take an LED, put it into the pins. The silver pin socket is where the long leg goes.
3. Add your bottle to the top.
4. Feel free to add more than one bottle. Don’t worry about duplicated medications with other people.

Artist’s Statement

What got you here today? What’s helping you get to the next place?

Medications don’t really “fix you” or “put you back to normal.” They help change you in a positive direction, because life only moves forward. So antidepressants don’t put you back to before your brain crashed, they help you live with your brain now. Hormones (as I understand them; YMMV) don’t undo the old experience of gender, but help you forge ahead. Etc. A log in the forest continues to grow after the tree falls, but that growth isn’t “putting it back to normal.” It’s helping to create a new path forward.

This project is a meditation (or maybe a metaphor, or perhaps a cardioid?) on all of that. It’s participatory, because while I have some experience from my medications, I think other people should get to include theirs as well—a nurse log carries forward a whole forest, not just one small tree. It’s also designed to embolden people to say “yes, I take these things to make my life better,” whether they’re hormones or antidepressants or stimulants or horse dewormers. People are invited to write drug names on bottles, decorate them with the markers, googly eyes, and puff paint, and then install an LED and place them in the logs.

The log is alive in many ways, still; it has blue oyster mushrooms growing in it (hopefully fruiting during ToorCamp!), the moss is alive, and more will come as it breaks down. After ToorCamp, I’ll remove all the plastic bits, partially bury the log, and let the piece become part of our native plant gardens. May our experiences nourish us all.

Artist’s Pretentious Statement (next page)

Artist’s Pretentious Statement A meditation on death, rebirth, growth, and change. These two logs came from damaged trees (one black locust, on a playfield in the New Holly neighborhood of Seattle, and one maple, at a private home in the Othello neighborhood of Seattle), and I have initiated the process of decomposition by adding blue oyster mushroom spawn and substrate to the interior of the log. In addition, I have added (and invite others to add) pill bottles decorated with the name of a drug you take, along with any other things (paints, eyes, markers) you think embody the spirit of the drug. Thus the log both embodies “nursing” in the sense of a nurse log in the forest, and in the sense of prescribing medication to help someone forge ahead.

Something, something, Bauhaus. Something, something, revenge.

Media

Black locust log (large) and maple log (small), blue oyster mushrooms + growing medium, RasPiZeroW + LED controller + LEDs + wires, pill bottles, some hot glue (a lot of hot glue)