Media Art Salon: Unstable Ecologies
Join us for an interspecies meeting of the minds on Wednesday, November 29th from 6-8PM at Oolite Satellite Space. The salon gathering will begin earlier than our previous events, to account for the shift of daylight savings time. Conversation and demos with the artists begins at 6PM with refreshments to follow.
This salon features artists cultivating a mutualistic practice between technology and the natural world. Ecosystems emerge from mediation with artificial intelligence, and we come to a new understanding of our place in this world through symbiotic exchanges between biological and computational processes. A softer side of digital transformation begins to take seed with interspecies refiguring of the technologies of power that are changing our lived experience.
Unstable Ecologies includes the work of Miami-based artists Felice Grodin, Fereshteh Toosi, Thom Wheeler Castillo, and Lee Pivnik. Each of these artists is deploying technology to connect our contemporary human experience with the environments and species of a city in crisis. Felice Grodin is working with AI to explore texture and biological patterns, subverting machine vision by putting technology at the service of her augmented reality creatures evolved from local species. Ferehsteh Toosi takes us on a journey through a younger generations’ view of the violently shifting geography of Miami, telling the story of a city shaped by climate catastrophe and hungry developers with memory and AR soundscapes. The stunning work-in-progress prints from Thom Wheeler Castillo envision a future for Miami where native growth has overcome the iconic architectures built in this impossible terrain. The ongoing research from Lee Pivnik offers speculative R&D in collaboration with AI to develop adaptive architectural solutions to Miami’s environmental precarity.
About the Artists
Felice Grodin lives and works in Miami Beach, Florida. Her projects depict speculative timelines that can be experienced in the present through the mediation of technology and community engagement. Grodin received a Bachelor of Architecture from Tulane University and a Master of Architecture with Distinction from Harvard University. Selected solo exhibitions include: “Felice Grodin: Invasive Species” at the Pérez Art Museum Miami (2017-2019) and “IM/Movable Assets” at the Miami International Airport (2019-20). Felice was a studio resident at Oolite Arts in Miami Beach, FL (2020-22).
Fereshteh Toosi designs experiences and art objects that pose questions and foster animistic connections. Their artwork often involves documentary processes, oral history, and archival research. Immersive performances are produced in conjunction with small sculptures, short films, installations, scores, and poetry, often situated in gardens, parks, and waterways.
Thom Wheeler Castillo lives and works in Miami, FL; Interested in landscape, environmentalism and ecosystems, he works from an interdisciplinary approach entwining histories, earth sciences and anthropology to confront living through the anthropogenic era. Since 2021, he’s embarked on cultural missions throughout the Caribbean region, working with Curator Rosie Gordon-Wallace and the Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator’s International Cultural Exchanges (I.C.E). He is currently an Artist-In-Residence Studio Fellowship with DVCAI and a 2023 recipient of its Catalyst award.
Lee Pivnik is an artist living in Miami, Florida. Working across disciplines, he takes inspiration from living systems and other species to imagine a future based on mutualistic relationships instead of extractive economies. He co-directs the Institute of Queer Ecology (IQECO), an ever-evolving collaborative organism that brings peripheral solutions to environmental degradation to the forefront of public consciousness. In 2022, he began a long-term project called Symbiotic House, which reimagines the home as a potential site for climate care and adaptation.
Date/Time
Wed, Nov. 29, 2023
6 – 8 p.m.
Oolite Satellite
7297 NW 2nd Ave.
Miami Fl, 33150
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