Leila Nadir and Cary Peppermint founded the ecoarttech collaborative in 2005 to explore environmental issues and convergent media and technologies. They will be at Hyperallergic HQ on Thursday, October 13 to discuss "Nature 2.0: Convergent Ecologies of Art, Media, and Environment."

Tickets are $5 and will include light refreshments.

This presentation will explore many crucial questions during our times, including most importantly "What does it mean to be a modern ecological being amidst a proliferation of networked environments — biological systems, global cultural exchanges, international commerce, industrial grids, digital networks and the World Wide Web?" This is the central question motivating art duo ecoarttech. They understand the “eco” in eco-art to refer not only to nature and built environments but also to mobile spaces, such as highways and subway trains, and “virtual” places created by digital media.

Ecoarttech’s work merges the primitive with emergent technologies, exploring how we relate to space, place, environment and new media at the same time.

• In "Indeterminate Hikes," smartphones provide trail maps to the wilderness of the East Village.
• In "#TrainingYRHuman," domesticated animals tweet about their human companions.
• "Untitled Landscape #5" data-visualizes the networked environmental impact of online “hikers” to the Whitney Museum of American Art website.
• In "Frontier Mythology," a solar-powered lean-to equips urban adventurers with the tools of the US frontier to navigate the dense information-environments of mega-cities, and "Wilderness Information Network" provides sonic experiences for bears, birds and trees on remote hiking trails.

What motivates ecoarttech’s work is not any particular “green” political issue but rather a sort of artistic-philosophical exploration of how modernization and new technologies have shaped how we think about and experience the “environment” — both personally and globally.

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Who Is Ecoarttech?

Leila Nadir earned her PhD from Columbia University and works as a post-disciplinary artist, scholar and creative writer. Peppermint has created new media art for over twenty years, and his works are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker Art Center, Rhizome at the New Museum for Contemporary Art and Computer Fine Arts. Their collective work includes recent commissions for the Whitney Museum of American Art, Turbulence.org, and the University of North Texas and exhibitions/performances at the MIT Media Lab, Smackmellon Gallery, European Media Art Festival, Exit Art Gallery and the Neuberger Museum of Art.

In 2011, Nadir and Peppermint will be “off-the-grid” artists-in-residence at Joya: Arte+Ecología, based at Cortijada Los Gázquez in Eastern Andalusia. They are also at work launching their own residency program in the Maine mountains for new media eco-artists who find living in a primitive, networked treehouse stimulating to their creativity. They teach at the University of Rochester in upstate New York.