Tega Brain
2021-2022 *This Is Not A Drill* Faculty Fellow
Tega Brain is an Australian born artist and environmental engineer whose work examines how technology shapes ecology. She has created wireless networks that respond to natural phenomena, systems for obfuscating fitness data and an online smell based dating service. She has recently exhibited in the Vienna Biennale for Change, the Guangzhou Triennial and in venues like the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin and the New Museum, NYC, among others.
Her work has been widely discussed in the press including in the New York Times, Art in America, The Atlantic, NPR, Al Jazeera and The Guardian and in art and technology blogs like the Creators Project and Creative Applications. She has given talks and workshops at museums and festivals like EYEO, TedxSydney and the Sonar Festival.
Tega's first book is Code as Creative Medium, co-authored with Golan Levin and published with MIT Press. She works with the Processing Foundation on the Learning to Teach conference series and p5js project. She has been awarded residencies and fellowships at Data & Society, Eyebeam, GASP Public Art Park and the Australia Council for the Arts. Tega is an Industry Assistant Professor of Integrated Digital Media, New York University.
Research Interests: Digital Media, Computational Arts, Critical Design, Built Environment, Human Computer Interaction
PROJECT
The Archive of Ecological Activism and Disobedience
The Archive of Ecological Activism and Disobedience
As climate writer Emily Akin argues, the climate story is no longer one of science, but one of injustice, corruption and deception. With this understanding, how do we take action against the powerful political forces that continue to obstruct progress towards meaningful climate action and environmental protections? Led by myself and artist Sam Lavigne, the Archive of Ecological Activism and Disobedience expands thinking around this question. This project will take the form of an online archive of ecological action and disobedience, assembled from a year-long period of research on environmental direct action, past and present. The goal of this work is threefold: to expand the contemporary imagination for methods and approaches for environmental action, to attend to the work being done at present and finally, to document the long history of people fighting for a livable world - many of whom are little known and suffering legal consequences for this work.
This project is done in partnership with Sam Lavigne.
Sam Lavigne is an artist and educator whose work deals with data, surveillance, cops, natural language processing, and automation. He has exhibited work at Lincoln Center, SFMOMA, Pioneer Works, DIS, Ars Electronica, The New Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and his work has been covered in the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the Guardian, Motherboard, Wired, the Atlantic, Forbes, NPR, the San Francisco Chronicle, the World Almanac, the Ellen Degeneres Show and elsewhere.
He has taught at ITP/NYU, The New School, and the School for Poetic Computation, and was formerly Magic Grant fellow at the Brown Institute at Columbia University, and Special Projects editor at the New Inquiry Magazine. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Design at UT Austin.