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"What
Every Gardener Knows" is an audio installation, consisting
of music written by Susan Hiller derived from Mendel's theory
of inherited traits. The piece is an electronically timed
carillon that precisely marks the hours, half-hours and quarter-hours;
it is designed to be installed outdoors in a garden. The work
was originally commissioned in for the exhibition "Genius
Locii" in Stadtpark Lahr (Schwarzwald). Mendel's discovery
of genetic patterns was used to justify the so-called 'science'
of eugenics, which proposed the elimination of all individuals
who carried 'undesirable' inherited traits, but Hiller's musical
version of the Mendelian code instead reiterates and celebrates
the variety and richness of the genetic patterns which characterize
all living things, including weeds.
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