The artist as mad scientist

June 22, 2006 | It's an icy spring morning and Natalie Jeremijenko skates into the Soy Luck Club on Rollerblades. The boutique cafe in New York's West Village has polished concrete floors, brick red walls and burnished wood counters. It feels like it was designed to be featured in one of those big modernist architecture magazines. But Jeremijenko's chaotic energy seems to melt the frosty interior into thin air.

Wearing a parka with a fake fur collar over a tight dress, she rolls around the glossy Knoll furniture, talking nonstop about her latest art project. She has all kinds of science degrees and drops terms in biology and mechanical engineering the way most people do the names of film stars. With her animated eyes and sly smile, her blond hair pulled loosely behind her head, she has the magnetism of a natural actor. Yet her enthusiasm often overtakes her logic and her sentences dart around like children. Born and raised in Australia, she retains her Aussie accent and seems to live so comfortably on abstract planes that at times you don't know where she's coming from. And that, her husband, Dalton Conley, a New York University sociology professor and writer, later says, goes for him too.

Alighting at a table, Jeremijenko, 39, explains that her work is "all about creating interfaces that draw people into the environment and get them to reimagine collective action." She cracks open her laptop and displays an image of 100 polycarbonate tubes or "buoys" that she's engineered to glow when fish swim through them in the Hudson River. Yes, she really has government approval to position the buoys in the river. Given her day job as a professor, she convinced state environmental officials her project was all about science. But never mind that. Did you know the fish were on Zoloft? All the antidepressants that New Yorkers take are flushed through their urine into sewage treatment plants, which overflow into the river. You doubt her? Go to the Whitney Museum and see one of her drawings hanging on a wall by a bathroom. It features a woman's bottom, her pants below her knees, on a toilet seat. It asks, "Why are the Hudson River fish and frogs on antidepressants?" Printed on it in tiny letters are actual studies that attest to the chemical drug compounds in the waterway consumed by the unsuspecting bass, sturgeon and crabs.

Anyway, when the buoys light up, you can feed the fish food treated with chelating agents to help cleanse the PCBs from their blood, planted there from decades of General Electric dumping waste into the river. The fish food, in fact, will not be much different from the energy bars we're always eating on hiking trails. "The idea that we eat the same stuff is a visceral demonstration that we live in the same system," Jeremijenko says. "Eating together is the most intimate form of kinship. By scripting a work where we share the same kind of food with fish, I'm scripting our interrelationship with them."

Oh, and one more thing. Do you know about the American doctrine that says a corporation has the status of a person and enjoys all the legal protections afforded by the Constitution, including the right to own property? Well, beginning this week, Jeremijenko is selling the buoys to collectors. With the money, she plans to form a corporation called Ooz Inc. -- zoo spelled backward -- and put the fish on the board. That way the fish, as shareholders, will acquire personhood, and have a say in the preservation of their grungy habitat.

Is she kidding? No, she's not. She wants us to feel as connected to wildlife in New York City as we do in the Adirondack Mountains. And reflect on the ways we impact nature and the ways it affects us. She's a maverick environmentalist whose field notes are public artworks. But she is being playful, a hallmark of her art and personality, and the trait that allows her work to stand out in the vital cultural arena where art and science collide.

Next page: Say goodbye to the prissy art in the corner