Ecoarttech is an experimental, postdisciplinary, mixed media environmental art collaborative founded in 2005 by artist Cary Peppermint and literary writer/critic Leila Christine Nadir. The collaborative explores the complex relationships between modernity, technologies, networks, and concepts of nature and culture. Merging primitive with emergent technologies, ecoarttech’s work investigates the overlapping terrain between “nature,” built environments, mobility, and electronic spaces.Ecoarttech website. In furtherfield.org, Sophia Kosmaoglou writes, "Refusing to regard technology merely as a tool, Ecoarttech expand the uses of mobile technology and digital networks revealing them to be fundamental components of the way we experience our environment... By drawing our attention to the increasing replacement or mediation of physical experiences by technology, Ecoarttech challenge the widely reproduced distinction between nature and culture."Sophia Kosmaoglou, "Interview with Leila Nadir and Cary Peppermint of Ecoarttech," Furtherfield.org (April 20, 2012) In visualMAG, Teresa de Andrés describes the artists as "determined to blur the frontiers between city and countryside by using technologies in a creative way... they invite us to lose ourselves in unexplored lands, sinuous urban alleys and arid mountains to the south of the Earth."The wildness in the city," Interview with Teresa de Andrés, visualMAG (June 13, 2012)

Eclipse

In 2009, ecoarttech launched "Eclipse," an internet-based work commissioned by Turbulence of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc.Eclipse, 2009 and Untitled Landscape #5, a digital environmental artwork commissioned by the Whitney Museum of Art, as part of the Sunrise/Sunset series inaugurated in 2009.Untitled Landscape #5, Whitney Museum of American Art Sunrise/Sunset Series, 2009 In 2010, ecoarttech worked with the University of North Texas on a work exploring the Trinity River Basin of North Texas and unique, man-made waterbody called Soil Conservation Services Hickory Creek Basin Retarding Pond 16."EcoArtTech lecture launches WaterWays 2010 and Fluid Frontier initiatives," UNT News and Events

Indeterminate Hikes+

In 2011, ecoarttech released Indeterminate Hikes+, a mobile phone app that they say "imports" the rhetoric of wilderness into everyday life through Google-mapped hiking trails, the app attempts to inspire a sense of ecological wonder at usually disregarded spaces, such as city sidewalks, alleyways, and apartment buildings." In an interview, they reported their goal to be the following: "We wanted to see what would happen if a walk down a sidewalk were treated as a wilderness excursion. What if we consider the water dripping off an air-conditioner with the same attention that we give a spectacular waterfall in the wilderness?"

Awards

Ecoarttech's research has been awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Digital/Electronic Arts Fellowship,NYFA speaks with 2009 Digital/Electronic Arts Fellows New York State Council on the Arts Media Arts Distribution Grant, Andrew Mellon Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship, and Franklin Furnace Performance Grant.

Locations exhibited

They have exhibited and lectured at the Whitney Museum, University of California, Los Angeles, MIT Media Lab, Banff New Media Institute, European Media Art Festival, Neuberger Museum of Art, and the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga. Their works are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, Rhizome.org at the New Museum, Turbulence.org of New Radio and Performing Arts, and the Cornell University Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art. In 2012, Cortijada Los Gazquez creative retreat released two videos of collaborations conducted with ecoarttech in southern Spain.Joya: Arte + Ecología Artists in Residence:ecoarttech; Joya: Arte + Ecología presenta Indeterminate Hikes+ de ecoarttech en HONDAKIN 2012 de AlhóndigaBilbao

Creator info

Nadir earned her PhD in literature from Columbia University and was Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow of Environmental Humanities at Wellesley College in 2010-2011. Peppermint is Assistant Professor of Digital Art at University of Rochester, where Nadir also teaches humanities courses in the sustainability and digital studies programs.University of Rochester faculty profile.

Notes

External links ecoarttech , part of Dynamic Coupling issue, media-N (Fall 2010) Timothy Scott Barker, “Information and Atmospheres: Exploring the Relationship between the Natural Environment and Information Aesthetics,” Media Culture (Summer 2012) Indeterminate Hikes+ Center for the Wildness in the Everyday