about
Cary Peppermint and Leila Christine Nadir founded the ecoarttech collaborative in 2005 in order to explore environmental issues and convergent media and technologies from an interdisciplinary perspective, including art, digital studies, philosophy, literature, and eco-criticism. For ecoarttech, the term “environment“ does not refer only to nature or geographic spaces; rather, we understand it as part of an interwoven network of biological, cultural, mental, and digital spaces, and we imagine the health of each as indistinguishable from the health of others. In the words of Gregory Bateson, the planet is part of humans’ “eco-mental system“: “if Lake Erie is driven insane [by pollution], its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience.“
Recent exhibitions include Exit Art Gallery (NYC), Neuberger Museum of Art, Sonoma Art Museum (Santa Rosa, CA). Ecoarttech’s video “Wilderness Trouble“ toured with the European Media Art Festival around the globe, with screenings in Germany, Poland, Lebanon, Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, among other places, and has been translated into numerous languages. Ecoarttech regularly curates exhibitions of digital eco-art, including Nature 2.0 at Colgate University in 2008, which featured works by Natalie Jeremijenko, Brooke Singer, Jane Marsching, Alexander Galloway, Michael Alstad, Andrea Polli, Amy Franceschini of Futurefarmers, and other artists. In 2008, Cary and Christine were senior artists faculty at the Banff New Media Institute in Canada. Recent works include “Eclipse“ (2009), an internet-based work commissioned by Turbulence of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., “Untitled Landscape #5“ (2009), a digital environmental work commissioned by the Whitney Museum of American Art, and “Center for Wildness and the Everyday“ (2010), an interdisciplinary networked artwork created collaboratively with faculty and students at the University of North Texas exploring the Trinity River Basin and commissioned by the UNT College of Visual Arts and Design.
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Leila Christine Nadir is a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow in Environmental Studies at Wellesley College and earned her Ph.D. in English from Columbia University in 2009. Her teaching and research focus on the environmental imagination, navigating the fields of twentieth-century art and literature, digital studies, modernity/modernism, and continental philosophy. Her article on U.S. science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin and French philosopher Miguel Abensour received the Society for Utopian Studies annual Arthur O. Lewis Award and was published in the Winter 2010 issue of Society's journal, Utopian Studies. Her latest writing, "Making a Home in a Digital-Ecological Environment," was included in the Whitney Museum's Undercurrents: Experimental Ecosystems in Current Art, published in association with Yale University Press. In addition to ecoarttech, Leila's current projects include writing a memoir about growing up in an Afghan immigrant community in rural Central New York during the Cold War and reworking her doctoral dissertation into a book intertwining ecological theories of modernity, media, art, and literature.
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Cary Peppermint's art explores the convergence of ecological, cultural, and digital networks. His teaching and research span internet art, video, photography, drawing, sound, sculpture, and performance. Cary was an early practitioner of internet art in the 1990s and his site restlessculture.net showcases his performative style of net art. Components of restlessculture are included in the collections of the Walker Art Center, Rhizome.org at the New Museum for Contemporary Art, Computer Fine Arts, and The Whitney Museum of American Art. Since co-founding ecoarttech in 2005, Cary's work has focused on the creative representation of environmental data and the unexpected ways in which technology and "natural" phenomena can be experienced through interdisciplinary, collaborative art experimentation. His recent curatorial projects include Wild Info Net, which exhibited sound works from over thirty international artists in the upper Catskill Mountains, and Nature Version 2.0, one of the first exhibitions of eco-art engaging new media technologies, in 2008. He is an assistant professor at Colgate University where he teaches courses in the theory and practice of digital art and has taught previously at Cornell University, Hartwick College, and Bronx Community College.
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"Nature and technology are often forced into an antagonistic relationship ...EcoArtTech, seeks to problematize this faulty opposition. ... the sublime is sublimated under layers of technological intervention."
- Caitlin Jones, founding member of the Variable Media Network
"EcoArtTech... collectively explores our relationship to and interfacing with our surroundings. Via a crafted synergy between technology and the environment, EcoArtTech challenges our perception and highlights the inseparability of nature and culture."
- Moe Beitiks from Inhabitat.com
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