04 — A Symposium at Parsons School of Design: Rhythms of Change

This event is part of Sensing Change, a citywide Festival presented by Art Switch Foundation and Transparent Eyeball. This year’s edition explores how humans and more-than-humans perceive and participate in change – exploring ecological systems and geological shifts to embodied knowledge and cultural transformation.

Drawing from process philosophy and resilience thinking, Sensing Change invites new ways of knowing - beyond screens and data sets, through collaboration, intuition, attention, and care.

We are delighted to invite you to the symposium Rhythms of Change, organized in collaboration with the Synthetic Ecosystems Lab and Parsons School of Design. Together, we will explore the perception and mapping of dynamic processes through a series of talks and discussions. The afternoon will include a keynote speaker, a panel, and video contributions from international scientists and artists. Followed by a reception.

Featured Keynote:

Daniel H. Rothman - Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Speakers include:

⊙ Tega Brain (NYU)

⊙ Harpreet Sareen (Parsons School of Design)

Contributions by:

⊙ Andreas Weber (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin)

KEYNOTE

Daniel H. Rothman is a theoretical scientist. His current interests focus on understanding how the organization of the natural world emerges from the interactions of life and the physical environment. This work uses mathematics in addition to statistical and nonlinear physics.The carbon cycle and its coupling to climate are central to the effort. Despite the huge societal interest in such problems, fundamental mysteries remain unsolved. For example, how do global biogeochemical cycles arise and evolve? Are they stable? How do they impact the stability of climate? To address such questions, Rothman typically construct simple mathematical models that predict or explain observational data. One recent result identifies characteristic climate-carbon cycle disruptions and their relation to mass extinction. Another shows how simple physical mechanisms lead to temporal scale-invariance in microbial respiration.

SPEAKERS

Tega Brain is an Australian artist and environmental engineer born when atmospheric CO2was 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.

Harpreet Sareen is a designer, researcher and artist creating mediated digital interactions through the living world, with growable electronics, organic robots and bionic materials. His work has been shown in museums, featured in media in 30+ countries, published in academic conferences, viewed on social media 5M+ times and used by thousands of people around the world. He has also worked professionally in museums, corporates and international research centers in five countries, is currently an Associate Professor at Parsons of School Design in New York City and directs the Synthetic Ecosystems Lab that focusses on post-human and non-human design

CONTRIBUTIONS

Andreas Weber is a biologist, philosopher, and nature writer. His latest books are Enlivenment. Toward a Poetics for the Anthropocene (MIT Press, 2019) and Sharing Life: The Ecopolitics of Reciprocity (Boell Foundation, 2020). Free download at https://in.boell.org/en/2020/09/10/sharing-life-ecopolitics-reciprocity. He teaches at the University of the Arts, Berlin and lives in Berlin and Italy. For more information visit biologyofwonder.org.