Expanded Ecologies

Ecology has become generalized. What began as a natural science discipline that investigated the relations between an organism and its environment has become a general worldview that posits relations themselves as ontological. Karen Barad’s “intra-action,” Bruno Latour’s “actor-network theory,” Donna Haraway’s “string figures,” Jane Bennett’s “vibrant matter,” Deleuze and Guattari’s “rhizome,” and Rachel Carson’s “web of life,” each focus attention on the interactions, communications, and exchanges between beings and things. With relations as foundational, things start to disintegrate. Beings become porous, their boundaries indistinct, as organisms are understood to be contingent within kaleidoscopic webs of life. How do these conditions open the field of art production? How do they foreclose it?

Beall Center for Art + Technology’s new Art + Ecology offerings recognize that technology isn’t the only “art plus” intersection worth exploring. We’re approaching our 25th anniversary and—like the world around us—we will need to adapt to thrive. Expanded Ecologies is the third event in a sequence of programming experiments that began with our Winter/Spring 2022 speaker series and continued with sponsorship with the graduate seminar Arts at Burns Piñon.

Beall MFA Exhibition Open Call 

Image: Misha Davydov, Who Bent the Tall Grasses, 2023;  Four archival pigment prints, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.