How do we engage technology sustainably and in a way that supports creativity and freedom? With EcoArtTech
EcoArtTech (Leila Cristine Nadir and Cary Peppermint), is new media duo that studies the environmental imagination–from nature and built spaces to the mobile landscape and electronic environments–in the afterglow of modernization. EcoArtTech performances, exhibitions, and lectures have taken place at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Postmasters Gallery, New York University, 319 Scholes, Smackmellon Gallery, Exit Art, U.C.L.A., M.I.T. Media Lab, ISEA 2012, Banff New Media Institute, European Media Art Festival, Parsons The New School for Design, and the Neuberger Museum of Art
EcoArtTech, Indeterminate Hikes+, 2012–14, wilderness actualizing app for mobile devices; Courtesy of EcoArtTech 2012–14.
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Katia Haus- Which one of your interests came first, ecology or technology? and why did you decided to mix them?
EcoArtTech- Ecology and technology are always mixed. They are often thought to be antithetical to each other, but we see humans as ecological and technical beings at the same time: human-animals literally cannot survive without technics. We are often frustrated by how environmental thinkers often reject technology (at least traditionally--that may be changing) and that technologists often forget that ecology and nature exist. Our works merge primitive with emergent technologies and navigate the intertwined terrain between nature, built environments, mobility, and electronic spaces.
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On a more personal level: We both grew up in rural areas before moving into cities, and we both always identified as "environmentalist." We were always "interested" in nature and we have both spent a lot of time backpacking in wilderness areas and sleeping under the stars. However, ecology, in the deep sense, in the primordial, intellectual, spiritual sense did not always inhabit all our thoughts and ideas as it does now. And again, investigations and experiments with technology was always a part of Cary's life: he was taking apart and hacking his parents' VCR and designing his own modems in the 1970s.
EcoArtTech, Wilderness Collider, 2013, web app with live data from IH+, from basecamp.exe; Courtesy of EcoArtTech 2012–14.
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K- How did Cary and You began working together?
EAT- We met in 1996 but didn't begin working together professionally until around 2004/05. At that point, Leila was a PhD student at Columbia University, studying literature and theory. Cary had been working as a new media artist for over a decade and was part of the early net art scene in NYC. In 2003, we moved into the woods and lived off-the-grid in a primitive cabin, and the experience caused what we call our "environmental turn." At that point, we both reimagined our respective practices in a more ecological way, merging media, technology, literature, and environment. Few people were during work like that ten years ago. Our collaborative name, EcoArtTech, in fact, arose out of a short-lived faux-academic online performance we called The Department of Ecology, Art, and Technology. At the time, we were thinking about a much needed ecological update to Experiments in Art and Technology, the organization founded four decades ago, which continues to advocate and facilitate collaboration between artists and engineers in the spirit of innovation. As we merged the areas of ecology, art, and technology, we found ourselves making work in the gaps between artistic and academic areas that rarely, if ever engaged in dialogue, between environmental art and thought, new media art and theory, and technology studies. In our nearly eight years of working together, what has remained consistent in Cary and I’s practice is the focus on the overlap between these areas, especially on how to use new media in unexpected ways, to reimagine environmental relationships through the staging of networked, aesthetic experiences.
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K- How have the internet and computers pushed your field of work?
EAT- How do we engage technology sustainably and in a way that supports creativity and freedom? And if human beings are technical beings, relying on nature and culture simultaneously, is it even possible to distinguish between what’s natural and what’s not? Isn’t our sustenance dependent upon not only our biological needs (clean air, water and food) but also our cultural practices, beliefs, and imagination? This is why we find it essential to think about electronic spaces and digital technologies whenever we think about the “environment."
EcoArtTech, Indeterminate Hikes+, 2012–14, wilderness actualizing app for mobile devices; Courtesy of EcoArtTech 2012–14.
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K- How have you seen that technology facilitates our re-integration to natural environments?
EAT- We are not sure that technology essentially does anything. Instead, we ask about how humans are using technology. Are we using technologies in ways that facilitate environmental relationships and sustainability, or in ways that disembed us from places, the earth, and the ecological systems we are part of and need to survive?
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What motivates us most about working with new technologies is how they can be misused for unexpected purposes--and as unexpected environmental performances. Our recent project, Indeterminate Hikes+, had these questions at its core: Indeterminate Hikes+ is an Android/iPhone app for smartphones that reimagines how we interact with everyday landscapes and computing technologies. Smartphones, generally, are devices of rapid communication and consumerism, designed to get you what you want and where you want as quickly as possible. Indeterminate Hikes + reappropriates this technology for a very different end, turning smartphones into tools of environmental imagination, meditative wonder, and slowing-down.The app works by importing the rhetoric of wilderness into virtually any place accessible by Google Maps and encourages its users to treat these locales as spaces worthy of the attention we accord to sublime landscapes, such as canyons and gorges. With IH+, the ecological wonder usually associated with “natural” spaces is re-deployed to renew awareness of the often-disregarded spaces in our culture that also need our attention.
Basecamp.exe workshop with eighth-grade students from Ed Smith K-8 Elementary School, Syracuse, NY, at The Warehouse Gallery.
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K- Would you say that nature is a very important part of our culture hence a critical part of 21st century art?
EAT- We cannot live without "nature."
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K- Which are your goals with Echo Art Tech?
EAT- Our work has been expanding beyond the thematics suggested by the name "EcoArtTech." We are continuing to work together. However, we are increasingly going by our names these days. We have been working on food issues lately--a series of workshops and installations constellated around the title "OS Fermentation"--and we think it is divine providence that EcoArtTech has the verb "EAT" embedded within it.
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K- As a duo, why did you chose art as your main communication channel?
EAT- Art chose us. We didn't choose art.
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K- Do you consider your works in general to have a multispecies approach? And why is it important for you to establish cross bonds between species, like the case of bacterias and humans in OS Fermentation?
EAT- Our creative process is post-humanist. We recognize the nonhuman species and environmental influences, and even the technologies, that make humanity possible. The idea that animals, environments, and technologies influence and shape humans challenges the longheld Enlightenment idea that the humans are free, independent agents with objective control over the world. In a book called “What Is Posthumanism?” Cary Wolf explains the role of posthumanism in contemporary culture: “Posthmanism names a historical moment in which the decentering of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore.” Wolfe explains, however, that focusing on humans’ dependence on and creation by exchanges, systems, and interrelations does not amount to a dismantling of the human subject; rather, “the question of posthumanism… actually enables us to describe the human and its characteristic modes of communication, interaction, meaning, social significations, and affective investments with greater specificity” (What is Posthumanism? xv, xxv; orig. ital.).
The OS FERMENTATION installation is a collaborative hack with fruits, vegetables, and microbes. Live ferments, computer sensors, and custom software/electronics make fermentation’s subtle revolutions of pH, oxygen, and color visible to the human eye in a series of collectible prints. Click here for purchasing info.
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K- Which are your beliefs about mankind's entry to the anthropocene? Do you think art can earthbound its public?
EAT- We are not sure about beliefs. Instead, we try to be open to the subtlest feelings, and then we try to observe these feelings. Our latest video work, "Late Anthropocene," is just that: an observation and meditation on our feelings about the Anthropocene. We made the video because we wanted to somehow create a document of this historical moment. The question we asked ourselves was: How do you document a geological feeling?
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The following thoughts about the Anthropocene are taken from our video website:
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Late Anthropocene is a documentary of the psychic fractures created by unprecedented planetary unsettling. It is a work of potential mourning and a meditation on the contradictory impulses of the human species.
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We live in the Anthropocene, a geologic epoch defined by humanity’s profound reworking of the Earth’s ecological systems. Public dialogue about this time period circulates around the threats of carbon emissions, soil erosion, food insecurity, species extinction. We are filled will scientific facts, policy debates, and poor prognoses. But how do we nurture our imagination and take care of our spirits?
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As two artists who love to move between city and country, we are haunted by the changes occurring biologically–the almost-imperceptible changes as well as the dramatic: the new parasitic insects emboldened by warmer winters, the advancing water lines evidenced by violent hurricanes, the disappearance of frost-lines that once heaved homes’ foundations. Rural and urban environments have been spaces of refuge and creative inspiration for us, each one a retreat from the other. But now, as we move between spaces, our experiences are interrupted by the feeling that we are accompanied by ghosts–or maybe we are the ghosts–and by momentous changes that may have already taken place even if we cannot visually perceive them.
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K- Why does involving your "public" in your work, or transforming them into active viewers matters to you?
EAT- It helps encourage the creative abilities of all people. Disrupts the idea of artist as solitary genius. Gives both permission and power to participants.
EcoArtTech, OS Fermentation 2014+; Courtesy of EcoArtTech 2014+.
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K- Which are your thoughts about teaching through art as well as using it to generate knowledge?
EAT- It is all one and the same for us. Learning comes from lived experience. Best case scenario art provides life experiences through the re-framing of perspectives and then minds grow to accommodate new ways of being in the world.
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K-Have you achieved or caused changes in people and society with your work?
EAT- Yes. But not dramatic cinematic, revolutionary change. Small change like a left turn instead of a right turn. Or an increased awareness of space, time, and body for a few fleeting moments. People may say things like: "I have never seen a tree like that." or "Wow I have lived here my whole life and never walked down that street."
EcoArtTech, Indeterminate Hikes+, 2012–14, wilderness actualizing app for mobile devices; Courtesy of EcoArtTech 2012–14.
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K-Which would be your own definition of art?
EAT- There is no such thing as ART and art is everywhere, in the simplest gestures. All it takes is a conscious disregard for the cliched stories that are generated by engines of commerce and power and a slow, steady, increased awareness of the changes happening all around us right now.
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Leila Nadir is an Afghan-American critic, scholar, artist, and creative writer, and teaches environmental humanities courses in the Sustainability and Digital Media Studies programs at the University of Rochester. She earned her PhD in English from Columbia University in 2009, where she studied environmental thought, critical theory, and contemporary literature, and was Andrew Mellon Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow of Environmental Humanities at Wellesley College in 2010-2011. Her essays, reviews, and scholarship about natural, built, and digital environments appear regularly in academic journals, such as Leonardo, Antennae,Cather Studies, and Utopian Studies, and in popular print and online magazines, including American Scientist, North American Review, Hyperallergic, Furtherfield, and Rhizome.org. In 2011, the Society for Utopian Studies awarded her its Eugenio Battisti Award, and early in 2007 its Arthur O. Lewis Award, for her scholarship connecting the fields of environmental studies and utopian thought. For Leila’s full bio as writer/editor, click here.
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Cary Peppermint’s solo art performances were some of the first to examine the effect of online spaces on the ways we imagination the environment and have been exhibited by the Whitney Museum (New York), Moving Image Gallery (New York), Pace Digital Gallery (New York), M.I.T. Media Lab (Boston), International Symposium for Electronic Art (Chicago), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Center for Contemporary Art (Scotland), European Media Art Festival (Osnabrück), Itaú Culturales (Sao Paulo), the Kitchen (New York). Described by Artforum as “twenty-first-century takes on Warhol’s Factory,” Peppermint’s early work has been chronicled in Alex Galloway’s Protocol (MIT Press, 2004), Jon Ippolito and Joline Blais’s At the Edge of Art (Thames&Hudson, 2006), and Mark Tribe and Reena Janna’s New Media Art (Taschen, 2006), among other critical texts. He is currently Assistant Professor of Digital Art at University of Rochester. Visit restlessculture for an archive of his net art performances from 1997 to 2003.
