The Misbehaving Mower
Lawn mowing is a ritual of negotiating between the symbolic and literal boundaries of the suburban landscape. Evidenced by a number of legal disputes concerning yard maintenance across the country, collective and private interests conflate on the front lawn, as the space is individually owned but reflective of neighborhood property values and identity. A ‘good’ mower adheres to the standards of reasonable grass heights, the regulating lines of mowing patterns, proper distributions of plantings, acknowledgement of property lines, and scheduling and frequency of the operation, etc, etc. This project attempts to revise the instrument of lawn mowing to enable a practice that trespasses many of the physical, temporal, and behavioral boundaries of the suburban neighborhood for the homeowner who is interested in disturbing the order of neighborhood. The machine crosses the following boundaries: the lawn is mowed during the daytime, most typically on the weekend mornings or afternoons when homeowners are free from professional obligations. Headlights on the mower will allow the ritual to occur at night, when some of the boundaries between homes become less apparent or even invisible and one can move unrestrained by the complete view of neighbors. During the night, sounds and sights from homes spill out of their daytime frames and spread the yards and streets with their private contents. It is a time of opportunity for new behaviors to occur. the subtle distinctions of grass height and hue at the edges between homes becomes difficult or impossible to maintain in the absence of sunlight. A lawn mowed at night will most likely create new softer edges or transcend the boundaries between yards. Within an individual yard, flowers and other plants are contained in beds, separated from the mat of grass often with some kind of liner marking the edges. A lawnmower outfitted with a seed distributor (powered by the rotary motion of the wheels) can disturb the territory of grass and planter by haphazardly spreading wildflowers in its path. a ‘good’ lawn is a carpet-like covering of blades at a uniform height, not much more or less than two inches tall. Tilting the blade will create variation in grass heights within a single pass of the mower. homeowners are constantly fighting off the vestiges of wildlife that threaten to spoil a perfect lawnscape. Distributing birdseed will beckon the creatures that are typically prohibited from the grass. the mower usually maintains a vacant expression, concentrating on the chore and labor of mowing. The body stalks right and left across the lawn, building a rational pattern of rows, occasionally deviating from the order to negotiate trees or planters. A flaccid lawn mowing apparatus cannot maintain the rigor of typical mowing patterns, and the operator must find ways to move around the machine in order to guide it over the lawn. Some of the effects of this misbehaving lawnmower are immediately perceived, and others develop in the days following a mowing, as birds and squirrels are drawn into the yard and wildflowers begin budding. This project was advised by Krzysztof Wodiczko in Technologies of Dissensus at MIT in the spring of 2005. |
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