Huitztlampa, 2023

Huitztlampa, a mechatronic installation of everyday objects, is computer programmed to move in response to live weather signals from Los Angeles. Palma Rodríguez lives in a Nahua agricultural region outside Mexico City and wants his work to provide a heightened sense of urgency about both climate change and labor issues. In the pre-Hispanic Nahuatl creation story, four cardinal points are each associated with a deity: Huitztlampa, the south, is embodied by a hummingbird and the sun in the blue winter sky. This title and the objects (ladder, boots) also reference migrant workers, who must float like hummingbirds and move with the sun.

Fernando Palma Rodríguez (Mexican, b. 1957) combines his training as both an artist and an industrial engineer to create robotic sculptures that utilize custom software to perform complex, narrative choreographies. He lives and works in the agricultural region of Milpa Alta outside Mexico City, where he runs Calpulli Tecalco, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of Nahua language and culture. His practice is focused on indigenous ancestral knowledge as part of contemporary life and as a way of shaping the future as he responds to issues facing his community, such as human and land rights, violence, and urgent environmental crises.

Circle of Infinite Chaos, 2022

In 2022, following the COVID-19 pandemic, painter Clare Rojas made a series of paintings about “the edge” of environmental collapse, of political disarray, and of the anxiety produced by both. This included Circle of Infinite Chaos, depicting a woman lying beneath a sphere with intersecting loops and floating objects. Perhaps it is a metaphor for synapses firing in Rojas’s brain as she tries to make sense of chaos? As she notes: “I think my work has always teetered between chaos and the opposite of chaos. Serenity, maybe…I’ve always been searching for that balance, and the magic is somewhere in the middle.”

Clare Rojas is known for paintings with idiosyncratic personal narratives and abstractions. After relocating to San Francisco, she became associated with the Mission School in the 1990s, which drew heavily from narrative and folk art forms. Her flat, geometric style often references a quest for harmony among universal elements and represents relationships between humans and nature. Many of her paintings are seen to reference cycles of life between birth, death, and re-birth.

Glacier Trilogy — Part 3: Simulating glacial water systems, 2022

Schubert’s Glacier Trilogy — Part 3: Simulating glacial water systems looks to glaciers as the origin points of river systems, representing the future availability of water. Part 3 presents a real-time simulation of melting glacial ice that runs over an elevation map of the Western Alps. A carbon dioxide sensor in the exhibition space determines specific parameters, connecting the exhalation of visitors directly to the complex patterns emerging in the simulated fluidic system. The artwork considers both the impact of humans on the environment and how we might use technology to improve our relationship with nature, which, the artist notes, is necessary for confronting the climate crisis.

Dr. Theresa Schubert is a Berlin-based artist, researcher, and curator exploring unconventional visions of nature, technology, and the self. Schubert holds a PhD in Media Art from Bauhaus-University Weimar. Her practice combines audiovisual and hybrid media in conceptual and immersive installations or performances. Organic matter and living organisms, algorithms, and artificial intelligence are not just materials in the artwork–the artist considers them as meaningful co-creators. She works with immersive video environments and 3D Laser Scanning to challenge modes of perception and question the human-machine relationship in hyper-technological societies, where the nature-culture divide seems to dissolve in the digital realm.

Baroque Bodies (Sway), 2024

Baroque Bodies (Sway) is an interactive installation exploring the impact of the environment on gene expression. Nurturing embodied sensations of micro and macro scales, the work features a projected 3D model of a nucleosome, a cluster of DNA and proteins that holds genetic information. Landscapes reflected on surfaces were AI-generated using text excerpts from epigenetics research. Visitors’ movements influence views of the nucleosome. Multiple visitors’ movements share equal yet unpredictable “sway” over the view, just as environmental effects on gene expression compound in unpredictable ways. Movement also triggers sounds created with sonified data from simulations of chromatin (the material substance of the genetic chromosome).

→ Behind the Science

Baroque Bodies (Sway) engages emerging epigenetic research. The name derives from Greek: “epi” means “on” or “above” and “epigenetic” describes factors beyond the genetic code. It focuses on inheritable changes in organisms caused by modification of gene expression, rather than modification of the genetic sequence. If one’s genetic sequence were a musical score, its epigenetic expression could alter the way a song is played, without changing the song’s underlying notes. Environmental exposures, diet, lifestyle, stress, and social factors can have an impact on our health and disease risk through epigenetic changes that regulate whether genes are turned on or off.

“Genetic expression does not operate in a vacuum, and can’t be reduced to genes, but is affected by external stimuli and environmental influences. I wanted to use interactivity to create an embodied experience of this uncertainty and complexity while also eliciting agency through exploration, play, and collaboration.” —Laura Splan

Laura Splan is a New York City-based artist exploring intersections of culture, science and technology. Often working collaboratively and between disciplines, Splan’s practice reframes artifacts of the posthuman landscape. By playfully illuminating the sociopolitical dynamics of sensory experiences, Splan’s work cultivates intuitive and embodied comprehension of the interconnectedness of cultural and biological systems. Her research interrogates the “GUI/gooey” or liminal spaces that mediate our relationship to nature and to our bodies. Splan has exhibited her work internationally and is held in collections including the Thoma Art Foundation. Commissions include projects for the CDC Foundation, Vanderbilt Planetarium, and the Bruges Triennial.

→ Conversation: Laura Splan

Ephemeral, 2024

Ephemeral imagines a future where venture capitalists embrace “emotion technology,” speculating far beyond current emotion-sensing devices limited to analyzing facial expressions and biometrics. The project prototypes a transdermal implant which detects chemical levels in a user’s bloodstream and releases neuropeptides to trigger the artificial sensation of a targeted emotion—including love, excitement, or the feeling of a brand. The Ephemeral installation includes a video of a fictive conference in which a future company is promoting the implant. Intended as a provocation, the project explores the complex physiology of emotions and reminds of the uncertain future humans face with advancing biotechnologies.

→ Behind the Science

Ephemeral draws from research into neuropeptides—biochemical messengers that pass signals between neurons—and their complex effects on emotions. Consensus remains unclear as to the precise combinations of neuropeptides that produce specific emotions, given the complexity of cultural, environmental, and genetic factors influencing emotional responses. Research is currently underway to develop implant devices with the ability to sense chemical levels in the blood, such as neuropeptides, and administer tailored doses of medications directly into the bloodstream. During her residency with the Beall Center, Tapio worked with microfluidics researchers to imagine the ever-more-realistic future of such technologies.

“This work interrogates the belief that we can precisely control our living bodies through technology. We have a very limited ability to grasp very complex information, such as the layered mechanisms of emotion.” —Hege Tapio

Hege Tapio is a Norwegian artist based in Stavanger, the country’s oil capital. Tapio is currently pursuing artistic research with FeLT (Futures of Living Technologies) and is an interdisciplinary PhD fellow at the Innovation for Sustainability Program at OsloMet. Her practice examines the body as a landscape for “extreme self-mining” in bio-art installations, videos, and performances. She is the founder and director of i/o/lab – Center for Future Art, where she produced and curated a biennial from 2006–16.

→ Conversation: Hege Tapio