Expanded Ecologies
May 20 - June 10, 2023
Opening: May 20, 2023 from 2-5 pm PST
BEALL Center for Art + Technology
712 Arts Plaza, Irvine, CA 92617
Tuesday - Saturday 12-6 pm PST
curated by Zachary Korol Gold
Ecology has become generalized. What began as a natural science discipline that investigated the relations between an organism and its environment has become a general worldview that posits relations themselves as ontological. Karen Barad’s “intra-action,” Bruno Latour’s “actor-network theory,” Donna Haraway’s “string figures,” Jane Bennett’s “vibrant matter,” Deleuze and Guattari’s “rhizome,” and Rachel Carson’s “web of life,” each focus attention on the interactions, communications, and exchanges between beings and things. With relations as foundational, things start to disintegrate. Beings become porous, their boundaries indistinct, as organisms are understood to be contingent within kaleidoscopic webs of life. How do these conditions open the field of art production? How do they foreclose it? Beall Center for Art + Technology’s new Art + Ecology offerings recognize that technology isn’t the only “art plus” intersection worth exploring. We’re approaching our 25th anniversary and—like the world around us—we will need to adapt to thrive. Expanded Ecologies is the third event in a sequence of programming experiments that began with our Winter/Spring 2022 speaker series and continued with sponsorship with the graduate seminar Arts at Burns Piñon. More information at: https://beallcenter.uci.edu/exhibitions/expanded-ecologies