Tega Brain
Tega Brain is an artist and environmental engineer working at intersection of art, engineering and ecology. She makes eccentric engineering, reimagining quotidian technologies to address their politics. Her work takes the form of site specific interventions, dysfunctional devices, experimental infrastructures and information representations. She is currently a resident at Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology, she also does things at the School for Poetic Computation, and is full-time faculty at SUNY Purchase. In 2013, was awarded an early career fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts.
Presenting
Eccentric WiFi: Networks with others
Media are not only devices of information; they are also agencies of order.
- John Durham Peters, 2015
As our lives become increasingly networked, we have developed a profound sensitivity to signal topographies. We are mindful of when we’re leaving a wifi network, we prepare for the quiet zone of the subway and we adjust our behaviors in response to fluctuations in data speeds and gradients in signal strength. We have become radiotropic.
What design opportunities does this sensitivity to wireless connections present? Could our wireless infrastructures and devices be reconceived from being always-on, fast and efficient, to being rhythmic, dynamic? How might they be used to express the perspectives & agendas of non-human systems and lifeforms? In response to these questions I will discuss Radiotropism, a project currently in progress that sees the development of a series of eccentric and experimental wireless technologies. These are attempts to use wireless media to reorder our relationship to the world. Through this discussion I will also consider what it means for creative work to act not only at an informational level, but at the level of infrastructure itself.
