Exhibiting Artists

Christine Davis, Patricia Olynyk, Meredith Tromble

Curated by

Elena Soterakis and Jeannine Bardo

About

Umwelt exposes the multilayered work of artists who engage with the sciences, while offering visitors a nuanced view of what science both is and can be. Meredith Tromble, Patricia Olynyk, and Christine Davis are artists who approach science as material for art. Through their works in digital media, installation, sculpture, and photography, Tromble, Olynyk, and Davis orient viewers to a playfully provocative and imaginative world of questioning.

The complexities of science that these artists are investigating are reflected in the title of the exhibition. The concept of “umwelt,” as described in the semiotic theories of Jakob von Uexküll and interpreted by Thomas A. Sebeok (1976), “is the world as it is experienced by a particular organism.” “Umwelt” evokes more than environment; it emphasizes an organism’s ability to sense—a condition for the existence of shared signs. These signs offer meanings about the world, albeit of divergent sorts, to different types of organisms or even individual beings.

In conjunction with the mid-September launch of PUBLIC Journal #59: Interspecies Communication, edited by Patricia Olynyk and Meredith Tromble, the Zooid Institute is organizing a thematic exhibition and symposium entitled Umwelt that explores the vital necessity of the art/science exchange and key topics covered in this special edition. These include: case studies of art and interspecies communication; artificial intelligences as communicative agents; network or information theoretic approaches to interspecies communication; cross-species studies of gestural communication and sympathetic response; human/plant communication; communication with aliens; and theorizing interspecies communication and the very notion of species itself in the 21st century.

The Umwelt exhibition and symposium will probe the spectrum of communicative bodies and signals, de-centering human needs while necessarily taking them into account, with full appreciation for the humor and productive absurdities that often accompany human efforts to communicate with the welter of beings around us. The project of remapping human notions of communication within a broader context is fundamentally political and now urgent as rapidly changing environments and technologies unsettle long-standing assumptions about identity and agency. (Tromble, 2016). This project stands as the inaugural exhibition and mission statement of the ZI collective, mapping our individual histories and work (umwelt) to create another functional circle from which to explore and interact as we introduce our model of continuous ethical engagement with the world.