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Information Science Colloquium
Interspecies Co-Production and Other Interventions

Speaker: Beatriz da Costa, Profssor of Arts Computation Engineering, UC Irvine

Date: Thursday, January 24; 4:30 - 5:30p

Location: Kaufman Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall

Note: this talk is cross-listed with IS, but is sponsored by the Institute for the Social Sciences.

Abstract:

Beatriz da Costa will provide a brief overview of her recent work addressing air pollution and environmental justice. As an interdisciplinary artist and researcher, da Costa is particularly interested in the role an artist might occupy when operating at the intersection of art, science and activism. Her PigeonBlog project is a collaborative project between homing pigeons, artists, engineers and pigeon fanciers engaged in a grassroots scientific data gathering initiative designed to collect and distribute information about air quality conditions. A current related project entitled AIR (a project by Preemptive Media), enables interested humans to build and design their own air pollution sensing devices and find out more about the air quality condition in their own neighborhoods. In 2006, together with biologist Tau-Mu Yi, she attempted to design carbon monoxide sensitive yeast cells expressing color upon exposure to ambient air elevated carbon monoxide concentrations. da Costa will discuss these and other projects, exemplifying her attempts to bridge disciplinary discourses and practices in the pursuit for social change.

Bio:

Beatriz da Costa is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher who works at the intersection of contemporary art, science, engineering and politics. Her work takes the form of public participatory interventions, locative media, conceptual tool building and critical writing. da Costa has also made frequent use of wetware in her projects and has recently become interested in the potential of interspecies co-production in promoting the responsible use of natural resources and environmental sustainability. Other issues addressed in her work include the use of emergent technologies to investigate context specific configurations of social injustice, the politics of transgenic organisms, and the social repercussions of ubiquitous surveillance technologies. Through her work da Costa examines the role of the artist as a political actor engaged in technoscientific discourses. This topic will also be addressed in a forthcoming anthology she is currently co-editing with her colleague Kavita Philip entitled Tactical Biopolitics: Theory & Practice life.science.art, (ed. Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Philip, MIT Press, 2008).

da Costa is a co-founder of Preemptive Media, an arts, activism and technology group, and a former collaborator of Critical Art Ensemble (2000-2005). She has exhibited and lectured both nationally and internationally at venues such as the Andy Warhol Museum, Exit Art Gallery, the Zentrum fuer Kunst und Medien in Germany, SONAR 2006 in Barcelona, the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts in Montreal, and the Natural History Museum in London. Recent media coverage of her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Reuters, CBS Evening News, BBC, CBC and the New Scientist. da Costa has received grants from the Durfee Foundation, the Inter-Society for Electronic Arts and the University of California Institute for the Research in the Arts. She has also received an Honorary Mention from the Adobe Emergent Artists Award and been nominated twice for the Rockefeller New Media Arts grant. Preemptive Media recently received the Social Sculpture Commission from Eyebeam and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and has received past funding from Franklin Furnace, Turbulence, the Experimental Television Center and the Beall Center for Art and Technology.

da Costa received her degrees from the Ecole d’Art d’Aix en Provence in France. She also spent 2 years as an exchange student at Carnegie Mellon University while completing her MFA thesis. da Costa’s main area of teaching at UCI resides within the Arts, Computation, Engineering graduate program. In addition she also teaches undergraduate courses in Studio Art and Computer Engineering, and frequently supervises graduate students across a range of other disciplines.

For more information, please contact Anneliese Truame.

12-10-2007 Sarah