Australian artist-engineer Tega Brain is profiled in a piece called “Hack the Planet” in the new, nature-themed issue of Logic Magazine. The only technology review of its kind, Logic’s combination of left-wing politics and theory, analysis of tech products and systems, and interrogations of engineering culture and practice are the perfect place for an introduction to Brain’s work, which is rooted in real materials and a deep understanding of the built environment but is holistic, ecological, even cautiously utopian in vision.
Brain, a professor of Integrated Digital Media at NYU, has shown her creative works around the world from Berlin to Ghuangzhou. Some of her work involves experimental combinations of hardware and software and she is involved in teaching and otherwise fostering this kind of creative practice that bridges art and code; Brain sits on the board of the Processing Foundation, and has taught at the School for Poetic Computation.
In the Logic profile (buy the magazine here to read in full), Brain describes how her career began in environmental engineering considering how cities, roads and other human infrastructure interact with natural systems. Frustration with the commercial limitations on these engagements led her to creative experiments like “Coin-Operated Wetland” – an installation that featured a closed-system physical loop where water circulated from laundry machines to a tiny wetland and back again – that could explore what an engineering beyond conventional constraints could concern itself with: for example, the downstream effects of a laundromat on wetlands.
Brain’s other innovations balance a sharp sense of wit with her strong interests in ecology and human activity: Asunder algorithmically generates absurd geoengineering projects, such as the transplantation of a Chilean lithium mine into Silicon Valley.
For more from this reflective and critical artist, check out her very good TED talk (one that avoids the glib solutionism found in many such talks) below.
