about
Cary Peppermint and Leila 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 the Whitney Museum of American Art, Exit Art Gallery (NYC), Neuberger Museum of Art, and the Sonoma Art Museum (Santa Rosa, CA). ecoarttech's video "Wilderness Trouble" traveled around the globe with the Special Tour of works selected from the European Media Art Festival, with screenings in Germany, Poland, Lebanon, Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Netherlands, and has been translated into Japanese, Polish, and Spanish. Cary and Leila have been senior artists faculty at the Banff New Media Institute in Canada, and in summer 2011, they will teach a workshop on art and networked landscapes at the Anderson Arts Center in Colorado. Cary and Leila regularly curate 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, and Amy Franceschini. Ecoarttech's most 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 commission inaugurating the Whitney Museum of American Art Sunrise/Sunset series; "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; and "Indeterminate Hikes," an Android app that guides users through New York City's Wilderness. In 2009, Cary and Leila were artist fellowship recipients from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
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Leila Nadir earned her Ph.D. in English from Columbia University and works as an interdisciplinary scholar, artist, critic, and creative writer, traversing the fields of trans-American literature, environmental thought, critical/cultural theory, theories of modernity/modernism, and media studies. In 2010-2011, she was Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow of Environmental Humanities at Wellesley College. Her writing has appeared in collections published by the Whitney Museum of American Art and Yale University Press, and her art criticism appears regularly in Hyperallergic. Her research in the field of utopian studies has been awarded with both the Society for Utopian Studies Arthur O. Lewis and Eugenio Battisti awards. In addition to ecoarttech, Leila's current projects include writing a memoir about growing up in an Afghan immigrant community in western New York during the Cold War and revising her doctoral dissertation into a book intertwining ecological theories of modernity, media, art, and literature. She teaches humanities courses in the Sustainability Studies program at the University of Rochester.
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Cary Peppermint's work explores the convergence of ecological, cultural, and digital networks, through a post-disciplinary practice with strong ties to internet and performance art. His works are in the permanent 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 with Leila Nadir in 2005, Cary's art has turned toward the imagination of the environment as a convergent network of biological, cultural, and digital spaces. Selected ecoarttech works include "Eclipse,” commissioned by Turbulence.org; "Untitled Landscape #5,” a commission for the Whitney Museum of American Art; and "Center for Wildness and the Everyday,” a series of digital media works and performances about water scarcity commissioned by the University of North Texas. ecoarttech's honors include a 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts artist fellowship and teaching appointments at Banff New Media Institute and Anderson Arts Ranch. Cary’s curatorial work has focused on digital, back-country, off the grid exhibitions such as Wild Info Net, a solar-powered sound-art installation in the Catskill Mountains, and Nature 2.0, one of the first exhibitions of eco-art engaging new media technologies. Peppermint is an Assistant Professor at the University of Rochester and has held previous appointments at Cornell University, Colgate University, and the Pratt Institute.
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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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