Speaker Series: The Art of Orchestrating Agencies

Tega Brain is an Australian artist and environmental engineer born when atmospheric CO2 was below 350ppm. Her work addresses issues of ecology, data, automation, and infrastructure and has taken the form of digital networks controlled by environmental phenomena, schemes 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.
In 2023, she completed , her PhD by practice at the Australian National University. This practice-led project interrogates how automated systems and AI are reshaping ecological thought. It also develops a model for practice called eccentric engineering that not only critiques the technological status quo but also, importantly, suggests new possibilities, imaginaries and approaches for designing systems that act in concert with their environments and which serve ecosystemic rather than exclusively human agendas.
In 2023, Tega received a Creative Capital award for the development of an experimental series of artworks developing novel carbon offsetting methodologies. She has also won grants and awards from Pioneer Works, Eyebeam, Ars Electronica, Data & Society, and the Australia Council for the Arts. She exhibits internationally having recently shown work at the Smithsonian Museum (Arts and Industries), The ZKM Karlsruhe, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, and the Haus der elektronischen Künste.
Her first book, (MIT Press, 2021), is coauthored with Golan Levin. She is an Industry Associate Professor of Integrated Design and Media at New York University and also serves on the board for the School for Poetic Computation.
Tega also has a long-running collaborative practice with artist, Sam Lavigne.

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