Sara Ludy: Tumbleweeds

In Tumbleweeds, Sara Ludy created a continuously evolving animated map of light points that corresponded to a performative intervention in the desert of New Mexico. Over the duration of the project, she attached shards of glass to tumbleweeds with biodegradable twine and released them into the landscape. Short video clips of light reflected by the shards appeared in the online map. As the artist released more tumbleweeds, she updated the animated “star maps” on a biweekly basis. Using materials that she drew out of the desert landscape—tumbleweeds and glass—Ludy’s project explores connections between nature and the online space, as well as craft practices of tying knots and techniques of visualizing data.

Ludy’s work highlighted the differences between space and time in the physical and online world: she intentionally obscured the scale of the territory represented by the maps, underscoring the distortions of space that occur in virtual environments. The light points “traveled” in time from the browser window at sunrise to the one at sunset, suggesting the timelessness of internet visuals that are not bound by conventional durations or natural cycles. Ludy was inspired by the physics concept of quantum superposition, the ability of a system—be it particles, waves, or an online map—to exist in multiple states simultaneously until it is measured. When the performance ended and no more tumbleweeds were released, a final star map collapsed both the sunrise and sunset version of the map into static points of light, creating an abstract digital painting. A video documents all the animated star maps created during the run of the project.