--empyre- soft-skinned space--
Thanks so much for the intro, Renate! There obviously is a lot more to say
about Beatriz' life and work than my introductory post can cover, but I hope it
serves as a start...
I cannot claim that I knew Beatriz/Shani as long as others who will be
contributing to this discussion and I may not have had as much insight into her
work process as her collaborators , some of whom will participate in the
discussion in the coming weeks. I became familiar with Shani’s work while she
was still a student in Marseille, through a couple of her instructors who were
praising her work. In 2004, I invited Preemptive Media (Shani, Brooke Singer
and Jamie Schulte) to present their project Swipe (2002-2004;
http://beatrizdacosta.net/swipe.php / http://www.preemptivemedia.net/swipe/) as
one of the gatepages for the Whitney Museum’s artport website. Swipe addressed
the problematic practice of data collection in the context of gathering data
from drivers' licenses via license scanners. For artport, Preemptive Media
created Swipe Stickers, which you could attach to the barcode on your license
to make it illegible (http://artport.whitney.org/gatepages/june04.shtml). I
also was a member of the jury that gave Shani’s project PigeonBlog
(http://beatrizdacosta.net/pigeonblog.php), which uses pigeons for grass-roots
data gathering about air quality, the emerging artist award at the 2006 ISEA01
Festival in San Jose.
Until 2009 Shani and I just kept in touch and met and gave lectures in the
classes we taught (at Irvine and RISD) when we were visiting the respective
other coast. I admired her and her work, which I closely followed, writing
about it in articles and recommendations for funding and fellowships. I
presumed that our exchanges would continue indefinitely until her diagnosis
with terminal cancer became a reality check for my naïve assumption. Our
relationship changed, and we made a point of spending more time and enjoying
life with each other, and providing support. The luxury of having many years of
friendship ahead of us turned into the intensity of struggling with a limited
time span that the medical profession calculates in percentages.
Shani’s personality was deeply inscribed into her work, which contributed to
keeping her alive. A curiosity paired with criticality and high analytical
ability (and a good sense of humor), as well as a poetic elegance emerging from
clarity and precision characterized her way of thinking and artistic approach.
Her discipline at times seemed super-human. Shani’s projects made major
contributions to the interdisciplinary fields of art, science, and technology,
as well as social and environmental activism. Her body of work comprised and
fused bio-tech initiatives, environmental activism, and interspecies
relationships. Collaboratively and in her own practice, she critically explored
issues such as access to and protection of data; developed alternative tools
for the detection of environmental pollution; and made use of participatory
practice and interaction with the public to raise awareness of public policies,
the effects of biotechnologies, as well as the rights of the individual.
Shani’s interdisciplinary practice by nature required collaboration with teams,
but the work she pursued outside of the collaboratives Preemptive Media and
Critical Art Ensemble seemed more geared towards interspecies relationships.
PigeonBlog and Invisible Earthlings (http://beatrizdacosta.net/invisible.php)
explore relationships and interdependencies between species from artistic,
scientific, and activist perspectives in highly original ways.
Her unrealized project Salmon Transmissions (2009), which she proposed for a
Guggenheim fellowship, was supposed to be part of her Companion Species Museum,
which was meant to exhibit relationships and interdependencies between species
from an artistic perspective. Salmon Transmissions uses the journey of one
salmon to explore issues ranging from environmental pollution and health;
migration, the local, and the global; as well as economic issues of
globalization.
Her 2010 Guggenheim proposal Interspecies Design consisted of models as well as
actual implementations of “architectures” that provide living organisms with
care units after exposure to environmental toxins; shelter and transportation
after environmental catastrophe; and responds to their ongoing rural to urban
migration activities.
Shani’s work provided a much-needed counterpoint to the proliferation of
commercially driven or naïve “green design” initiatives that promise to engage
with current environmental crisis. Her legacy raises many questions, from the
preservation of (collaborative) artistic work to the status of unrealized
proposals, which arguably are part of an artist’s body of work.
From: [email protected]
