Natalie Jeremijenko - On engineering biodiversity, improving environmental health and wrestling Rhinocerous Beetles

Can our personal and public pleasures become a potent force of social and environmental transformation?

This presentation will discuss recent work that re-imagines and redesigns our relationship to natural systems and begins to rebuild urban ecologies using participatory platforms and wondrous engagement with the irreducible complexity of natural systems. Projects surveyed will include: xAirport, a project to re-imagine flight and flight systems, to reclaim the wonder of flight and explore urban mobility the reconstructs natural systems; and the Cross(x)Species Adventure club, exploring possible foods and food systems that not only lessen our collective negative effect, but also improve environmental health and augment biodiversity. In addition, other projects will be selected from the recent survey "BiodiverCITY, 47 important ideas and technologies for the urban future", as they serve as a vehicle for adventure, wonder and exploration. During the course of the lecture we will make some gentlemanly wagers on the possibilities and strategies for producing a biodiverse and tasty urban future. nj

Natalie Jeremijenko
teaches visual arts, computer science and environmental studies at NYU and directs the university’s Environmental Health Clinic. An artist/experimenter and information engineer, she is one of the founders of the field of tangible media (also known as physical computing). Her work centers on structures of participation in the information age and the political and social possibilities (and limitations) of information technologies - mostly through large-scale public experiments. In this vein, her work spans a range of media from statistical indices (such as the Despondency Index, which linked the Dow Jones Industrial Average to the suicide rate at San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge), to biological substrates (such as the installations of pairs of cloned trees in various urban micro-climates), as well as to robotics (such as the development of feral robotic dog packs for the purpose of investigating environmental hazards). Her graduate work at Stanford and the University of Queensland was in the fields of design engineering and information science. She has taught at Yale University's Department of Mechanical Engineering, the Department of Visual Art at the University of California/San Diego, and was the McPherson Visiting Professor for the Understanding of Science at Michigan State University.