Server installation with Caddie Brain. Photo: Brendan Phelan

Spotlight on Tega Brain

“We’ve seen enough climate art about grief and loss and mourning. I make art to point to the agency we have in the climate crisis. We need art that experiments with system redesign, degrowth aesthetics and cultivates imaginaries for climate mitigation and adaptation. I also want to see climate art about reaching those most responsible for the crisis. Where’s the art about revenge?”

Eccentric Enginnering

Is critical:

  1. Realises systems rather than representations. But questions what a system can be and can do.
  2. Refigures definitions of utility and productivity.
  3. Looks to the non-technological to guide metaphors and imaginaries for the design and engineering of systems. 4. Favours good enough prediction and minimal computing.

Is post-human:

  1. Draws attention to automations outside of human-machine assemblages.
  2. Seeks to expand who and what gets to enact agency in decision making and events.
  3. Recognizes diverse forms of intelligence that go beyond those of the human or machine.
  4. Designs intra-structures, where systems are understood as negotiations that bring worlds into being.

Supports specific values:

  1. Offers critique through proposition, but works with explicit political commitments.
  2. Takes lessons from Indigenous cosmologies to recognize that design must enact explicit commitments to biodiversity, equality, environmental justice, and the autonomy of other lifeforms.
  3. Recognizes that engineering is a cultural practice. That culture can be engineered and that culture shapes what an engineer does.
  • Cold Call: Time Theft as Avoided Emissions

    Cold Call: Time Theft as Avoided Emissions

    Cold Call: Time Theft as Avoided Emissions is an unconventional carbon offsetting scheme that applies strategies of worker sabotage to the fossil fuel industry.

  • Solar Protocol

    Solar Protocol

    Solar Protocol is a network of solar-powered servers, installed and maintained by volunteers around the world. This community-run cloud, powered by renewables, collectively hosts the Solar Protocol web platform and other web projects, serving them from wherever there is the most sunshine in the network. The work explores natural rather than Artificial Intelligence.