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Tega Brain

Brooklyn, NY

Tega Brain is an Australian-born artist and environmental engineer whose work examines issues of ecology, data, automation, and infrastructure. She has created digital networks that are controlled by environmental phenomena, systems for obfuscating personal data, and a wildly popular, online smell-based dating service. Through these provisional systems she investigates how technologies orchestrate and reorchestrate agency. She has won grants and residencies from Eyebeam, Ars Electronica, Data & Society, and the Australia Council for the Arts. She has recently shown work at the Smithsonian Museum (Arts and Industries), the Vienna Biennale for Change, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Némo Biennale of Digital Arts, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. She is an Industry Associate Professor of integrated design and media, New York University, and her first book, Code as Creative Medium, is coauthored with Golan Levin and published with MIT Press.


Collaborator

Sam Lavigne is an artist and educator whose work deals with data, surveillance, cops, natural language processing, and automation.

Offset


Tega Brain is an Australian-born artist and environmental engineer whose work examines issues of ecology, data systems, and infrastructure.

Artist Bio

Sam Lavigne is an artist and educator whose work deals with data, surveillance, cops, natural language processing, and automation.

Artist Bio

Carbon offsets apply the logic of capitalism to our atmospheric interactions. This logic assumes that all activities on Earth can be quantified and abstracted (by means of a price) and therefore exchanged. Based on this reasoning, carbon offsets operate off the presumption that it is possible to export or outsource the effects of one’s decisions—whether at the scale of the individual, the community, or the nation state—to someone or someplace else, or even to future generations. In this way, existing carbon-offset markets act to maintain a status quo rather than address root causes of the climate catastrophe. Offset will be a work in the form of an alternative offset market that focuses on social exchanges and political actions that contribute to a program of radical change. It will be brought to life as a collection of outcomes: a series of unconventional offset mechanisms documented in video and graphics, an archive of offsets that we then purchase from organizations, and a marketplace in the form of an online platform or organization that allows an audience to buy and sell our alternative offsets. These outcomes will be developed in a range of formats: as graphics, as video documentation, and as a web platform. Together they will be presented as a physical installation work that will also include an online component.

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Sam Lavigne

Brooklyn, NY

Sam Lavigne is an artist and educator whose work deals with data, surveillance, cops, natural language processing, and automation. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Design at the University of Texas at Austin.


Collaborator

Tega Brain is an Australian-born artist and environmental engineer whose work examines issues of ecology, data systems, and infrastructure.