Wexner Center for the Arts: Get Involved

The sheep visit The Virtual Pasture Photos: Justin Braun

The Virtual Pasture

Wed, Oct 1, 2008 - Wed, June 30, 2010
Wexner Center for the Arts

Add to Calendar [?]

iCal/Outlook (.ics)

Because good farmers rotate crops, the site of The Beanfield is now a pasture for "virtual" sheep you can watch via live video feed from their home pasture in the country. The actual sheep visit the pasture on the first Monday of each month from 10 AM to 3 PM.

From 2006 to 2007 this once empty patch of green space just outside the Wexner Center was home to The Beanfield project by artist and Ohio State art faculty member Michael Mercil. The Virtual Pasture is the next installment in Mercil's ongoing "agri/cultural" investigations as part of the Living Culture Initiative in the Department of Art, in partnership with the Wexner Center and the Social Responsibility Initiative in the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences.

Believe it or not, sheep and cows once grazed Ohio State's central campus grounds. Horses pulled delivery wagons to classrooms, auditoriums, and dormitories. But animals—except pigeons, squirrels, rats, raccoons, and dogs—are now mostly absent here. The Virtual Pasture reanimates the campus landscape with a (small) flock of sheep, raised off-site but presented through images transmitted live to the on-site video monitor. The project entertains such questions as Where, when, and how do we encounter farm animals now? And, How might we reestablish contact with the living creatures with which we still share deep mutual dependence, but which we have made invisible in our daily life?

The Virtual Pasture is unfolding over time and evolving through several phases. First, the site was fenced and planted with a mix of orchard grass, tall fescue, bluegrass, and white clover, as well as two different apple trees. A reproduction of a bucolic painting of sheep in a landscape—with the image of the central sheep cut out—was initially added to signify the place of the animal in this small meadow. Now that spot is occupied by a large screen hooked up to a 24-hour live video feed from the farm where the sheep are being raised in conjunction with the project. Meanwhile, the sheep and apple trees keep growing, the sheep pay occasional "live" visits, and at least one of the trees has borne fruit.

Possible future aspects of The Virtual Pasture involve organizing an on-campus livestock auction and producing a video documentary video of the entire project. See more pictures and find out more on Mercil's web site. Read Mercil's comments on this piece on our blog.