Rahmani will present complex ideas about balance and change in the justice system and how physics and biology determine sustainable life systems. As humanity confronts the possibility of joining the sixth extinction there might be ways to approach our problems through the prism of art and find solutions. This talk will highlight Aviva’s research findings which emerged from a series of interrogative projects, such as Ghost Nets, Fish Story, and Blued Trees. We stand at a crossroads over environmental issues, sustainability, and climate change. This is an opportunity to align principles of common good, culture, and complexity theory as transdisciplinary activists.

https://www.avivarahmani.com/

Lalbagh TreeStory is an interactive Google Earth installation. Mechthild’s research as a Fulbright Scholar on ecology and art in India led her to explore the ecological, historical and cultural role of trees, the dichotomy of care and neglect in the Lalbagh quarter of Bangalore. Her ‘Engaged Media’ series addresses different aspects of the climate crisis. This latest project in the series reacts to the loss of hundreds of cooling avenue trees that were cut to make room for the Bangalore metro to lessen car traffic – two conflicting ecological needs, where money won over nature. The remaining trees live neglected in a film of dust and exhaust in stark contrast to their protected brethren in the adjoining Lalbagh Botanical Garden. Mechthild pairs texts on nature affirming quotes, healing and nutritional qualities with leaves and blossoms of Lalbagh trees for a ‘virtual’ replanting along the metro line. This work is in support of the Bangalore ecological citizen protests that called for awareness of and interdependence with nature.

https://mechthildschmidtfeist.com/

Hybris* is an installation-based multimedia performance that presents an artistic reflection on climate change based on a metaphor of hybrid beings such as the Grolar–offspring of the Grizzly and Polar bear–that are characteristic of our era. The project is based on scientific research on temperature shifts over the last decades and its impact. All the information gathered is used to create images, data visualization, and live video, articulated by a staged performance in a geodesic dome structure involving music, voice, performance, and projections on multiple screens.

This work looks to ancient Eastern philosophies along with scientific research, seeking balance between rational and irrational, conscious and unconscious – in relation to our interconnectivity with the animal kingdom. Our perception and experience of the world around us are limited by an anthropocentric viewpoint – in part a physical limitation of our senses, but largely because we forget that as animals we share a great deal of commonality (genetic, ecosystems, biospheres) with the species around us, despite morphological differences. The presentation will highlight how we can reimagine our relationships to animals and relate to them as partners in issues of environmental sustainability and climate change.

For 7 years now, a collective of artists and agricultural scientists have been collaborating on various projects. Recently, this collaboration expanded into inviting artists from outside the community whose work explored data physicalization to engage with specific data sets. The result was an exhibition that invited viewers to consider the implications of climate change and to introduce them to research that was being done in their community. The two data sets that they explored are both drawn from research that is specific to growing crops in challenging times: The first is the result of an experiment on breeding cereal wheats and wheat grasses with the intention of developing a perennial wheat cultivar; the second relates to experimentation in genetic modification aimed at reducing wheat’s susceptibility to the devastating pathogen known as stripe rust.

What means can we pursue to embody data? Science Art and Trash tackles how images, classifications, and geolocated actions can map to mental models and affect behavior. Borrowing from the concept of agency in interaction design, the project seeks to explore how agency can be augmented to scales that are only accessible through data. One of the main issues that affect how the adult population understands climate change today is the disconnect between cumulative actions and pollution. We know about climate change primarily through evidence based on data, otherwise it would be accepted as something humans have nothing to do with. The project utilizes a well-established smartphone app called Litterati (see litterati.org) to locate, collect and classify garbage found in the streets of a community, in order to expose the process that goes from data into evidence to adults who did not grow up in a context fully informed by data like what we have today. The images captured were assembled into a mosaic image showcased in a local mini traveling exhibit in 2019, and after the pandemic into grids circulated in local social media groups.

Sustained Signage is an artistic project portraying the concerns of sustainability, including the destruction of the Earth through war, overuse of natural resources, global warming, and the exploitation of workers. The project consists of four short computer animated narratives and twelve silk-screen prints on metal, each having a pictographic style resembling road signs. The imagery and prohibitive text provide viewers with evocative narratives and ambiguous instructions, such as a pictograph of the Earth being cooked in a frying pan, and followed by the text DO NOT OVERCOOK YOUR PLANET IF YOU WANT TO KEEP EATING IT.

https://aesthetic-machinery.com/sustained-signage.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EpuKJRbBwI

https://www.aesthetic-machinery.com/unnecessary-signage.html