Topic description / abstract:

The Anthropocene, and the complex systems of entanglement and feedback that define it, present a new representational challenge: How to both sense, and “make sense” of, the immanent and pervasive nature of planetary change. The niches that we’ve constructed for ourselves can reveal – but just as often obfuscate – the multispecies ecologies at work, and the strange trajectories in which they are evolving. This talk will look at these forms of dissonance as a question of “system aesthetics” and of umwelten that concern the dynamics of perception, its constraints, and the cycles of feedback and causality that they entangle.
 

Biographical note:

Andrew S. Yang is a transdisciplinary artist working across the flux of the naturalcultural. His projects have been exhibited from Oklahoma to Yokohama, including the 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015), a solo exhibition at the MCA Chicago (2016), the Spencer Museum of Art (2019), and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History (2020). His writings appear in Leonardo, Biological Theory, Art Journal, Evolution & Development and the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies. He will be the inaugural artist-in-residence at Yale-NUS College in Singapore in the spring of 2020. He holds a PhD in evolutionary biology from Duke University and MFA in visual arts from Lesley University School of Art and Design, and is Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

www.andrewyang.net