Blogalog, Part 1: About EcoArtTech

Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir founded EcoArtTech as their collaborative platform for digital environmental art in 2005. They are 2009 Artist Fellowship recipients from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA).

Their most recent work is a commissioned series for the Whitney Museum of American Art, the first of which can be found here. Untitled Landscape #5 disrupts the Whitney’s site at sunrise and sunset with glowing orbs who’s size and velocity is directly affected by the volume of visitations to whitney.org since the previous sunrise (for sunset) or sunset (for sunrise).

Other recent works include Eclipse, 2009, commissioned by Turbulence.org. Eclipse is described as a “user-driven artwork-application that alters and corrupts networked photostreams of United States national and state parks based on real-time Air Quality Index (particle pollution data).” So basically, the worse the air quality at the park that day, the more distorted the picture will appear in your personal web browser. Check out these pictures below to see the work in action…

Sequoia National Park:

Yosemite National Park:

Cary Peppermint is a conceptual and performance artist working with digital technologies and “natural” environments. His website Restlessculture.net is an internationally recognized platform for his ongoing series of net art and networked performance art. His curatorial projects include several international exhibitions of digital eco-art, including Nature Version 2.0: Ecological Modernities and Digital Environmentalism, Technorganic, and Wilderness Information Network. Cary has taught at Cornell University, Hartwick College, and Bronx Community College and is currently an assistant professor at Colgate University, where he teaches courses in the theory and practice of digital and new media art. His work is 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.

Leila Christine Nadir completed her doctoral studies in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in 2009 and has taught at Columbia, Oneonta State College, and Colgate University, including courses on American literature, modernity and modernism, and new media art history and theory. In 2008, she received the Society for Utopian Studies annual Arthur O. Lewis Award for the best paper by a young scholar, and her article on “green” literature is forthcoming in the fall issue of the journal Utopian Studies. In addition to EcoArtTech, Christine’s current projects include writing a memoir about growing up Afghan and Muslim in small-town America and reworking her dissertation into a book titled, Sacrifice and its Discontents: Ethical Paradox in Twentieth-Century Environmental Writing and Art.