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At Bronx River, an Invitation to Text the Fish

Next time you find yourself waiting for the Bx 40 bus on East Tremont Avenue between Boston Road and Devoe Avenue, Natalie Jeremijenko suggests you take a moment to stop and text the fish.

Jeremijenko, a professor of art and computer science at New York University, has set up an installation in the Bronx River which invites passersby to check in with the area’s “urban nonhumans” – like the alewife herring, blue crab, midges, and beaver which live in the Bronx River.

Officially unveiled on Oct. 16, the installation consists of eight thin buoys floating in the Bronx River across the street from the Bronx River Art Center, and visible from the sidewalk on East Tremont Avenue. Lights at the tip of each buoy change color depending on changing water conditions. Blue lights indicate high levels of dissolved oxygen, red lights lower levels, and the lights flicker as fish pass beneath the buoys.

“[You’ll] see a fish swimming by as a trail of light,” Jeremijenko said.

Jeremijenko will also post “business cards,” for different animals native to the river, encouraging people to text, for instance, Jose the beaver, the first beaver seen in the Bronx River in 250 years, who frequents that stretch of river. The buoys will “wink twice” at the texter and then send an update on whichever animal has been contacted – letting them know whether the beaver has been by lately, or how the herring are feeling about pollution levels that day. People can subscribe to regular updates from particular animals, which have their own characters.

The project is was commissioned by the Architectural League of New York for their exhibit “Toward the Sentient City.” Jeremijenko herself calls the project “OOZ”  – “zoo backwards and with no cages,” she said.

The goal, said Jerimijenko, is to re-think conservationists’ traditional approach to the environment.

“We spend a lot of time fencing [natural spaces] off, restraining people, not letting them in,” she said.  “Like we [humans] can only and ever do harm. Which is ridiculous…we’re not only a bad force, we can also be a good force.”

Jerimijenko’s project will encourage people to feed the animals – or at least the fish. She is installing a vending machine with fish food that passersby can toss into the river. The food is not only appropriate for the fish, she said, but also includes a chemical which binds to heavy metals and pcbs, common pollutants which fish ingest from the water and then pass up the food chain. Chemicals in the fish food attach to the polluting molecules and allow them to pass out of the fish more easily and then remain unreactive, and less dangerous, once they are released back into the river

Jeremijenko has a second, larger set of bouys in the East River, off pier 35 on the Lower East Side. The two installations are a way of highlighting the Bronx River’s importance to New York’s better known waterways, said Jeremijenko.

“[The] Bronx River is the only freshwater river in New York City, and a lot of fish depend on freshwater resources,” she said.  “It’s the East River’s nursery.”

It is satisfying, she said, that “the whole New York/New Jersey harbor and mighty East River depend on this tiny little trickle [which has survived 200 years of being] blocked by dams and humans using it as a gutter.”

By RACHEL WALDHOLZ

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