Art of Interference

Hosts: Tori Hoover and Emma Vendetta Salt: Homer called it “a divine substance.” Plato considered it as the element most dear to the gods, a distinction awarded for its central role in human life. Indeed, our bodies cannot function properly without it. But as the climate changes and warms and shifts in response to industrialization, the role of salt is shifting, too. Salts from human activity, lik...

Host: Lutz Koepnick In today’s episode of Art of Interference  we speak with Ursula Biemann, a Swiss artist based in Zurich. Her work over the last decades has explored forests in the Amazon and the Andes as critical engines of planetary life. In her widely exhibited films and installations Biemann continually seeks to bridge existing divides between Indigenous knowledge systems and Western scienc...

Soil is the foundation of life, but how often do we recognize it as such? On this episode of the Art of Interference , we speak with visual artist Allie Horick about her soil quilts—works that stitch together earth from family burial sites across Tennessee to tell a story of dispersed legacy and delicate connection. We also talk with regenerative farmer Maxwell Patterson and Vanderbilt professor C...

In this episode of Art of Interference , we explore the medium of wood as a means of rethinking traditional ideas of human and nonhuman being amid a world of planetary emergencies. “People are really more like wood than we might think,” carpenter, artist, and scientist Seri Robinson insists in our conversation. Wood is influenced by the weather, by climate change, and by its proximate environments...

Lithium plays a key role in the green energy transition. Its extraction, however, comes at considerable costs for the environment and for local communities, particularly in the so-called lithium triangle in Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile. In this episode, we speak with artist and curator Guely Morató Loredo and her collaborator, sound artist Victor Mazón Gardoqui, about two projects that engage wit...

Diné artist and photographer Will Wilson has been photographing hundreds of abandoned uranium mines and remediation site on the Navajo Nation over the last few years. In this episode, we speak with Will about this project, called “Connecting the Dots for a Just Transition,” and the power of photography to reveal and remediate environmental injustice. We also hear from Leah Lowe, the director of Va...

In this final episode of season 2, we talk with dancer and dance scholar Mariama Diagne about the art of “heavy hovering”—the ability of modern ballet and dance to teach us a different way of moving and being on Earth. We discuss efforts to relocate human life to other planets to escape the effects of climate change, the beauty of meeting the challenges of terrestrial gravity, the environmental le...

Smoke is a beautiful—yet sometimes strange, or even terrifying—phenomenon. In today’s episode, we explore how the mysterious qualities of smoke open up possibilities for exploration and better understanding of human relationships with the earth and air. First, we get to know the multi-colored, pyrotechnic smoke sculptures of esteemed artist Judy Chicago, who began producing these works in the late...

“Wind, wind, wind. If you repeat the word wind often enough, then it will blow by itself.” These are the poetic words of this episode’s featured artist, Theo Jansen, who has spent the last three decades creating and evolving his strandbeests—massive PVC creatures that walk down the Dutch coast powered by the wind alone. Wind propels sail boats, kites, turbines, and strandbeests alike, all with inv...

Our air and atmosphere require 21% oxygen to sustain life as we know it. Human-induced climate change has put this ratio under pressure. In this episode of Art of Interference, we feature Santiago Sierra’s work 52 Canvases and Ted Chiang’s short story Exhalation as two recent interventions that draw our attention to the precarity of the air around us. We talk with curator Meredith Malone about the...

Temperature regulation has become a deeply political issue in our boiling world. In this episode, we speak with London-based artist Susan Schuppli about her work on the violence of temperature and the inequities of climate control, and with architectural historian Joseph Siry about the role of air conditioning in twentieth- and twenty-first century building design. We ask what it takes to claim un...

“I am working very hard, although this morning... I was terrified to see that there was no fog, not even a wisp of mist: I was prostrate, and could see all my paintings done for, but gradually the fires were lit and the smoke and haze came back.” When Monet wrote this in a letter to his wife in 1900, the term “smog” had not yet been coined. But the artist was certainly describing the eerie beauty...

In this episode, we turn our attention to the carbon footprint of the contemporary art world. What can galleries and museums do to reduce their CO2 emissions? How do curators and museum directors rethink their exhibition and conversation practices to reduce their institutions’ environmental footprint. Our guests are Amanda Hellman, the director of Vanderbilt University’s Museum of Art, and Mark Sc...

In this episode of Art of Interference , we turn our attention to the larger-than-life cloud creations of Tomás Saraceno, an artist who creates cities in the clouds and flyable cloud sculptures as a way of imagining more ecological futures. We also hear from  media philosopher John Durham Peters whose book The Marvelous Clouds revolutionizes the way we think about humans, nature, and art. Finally,...

In this episode, we talk with Grammy-award winning fluteplayer Molly Barth about the relation of breath, contemporary flute music, and climate change. We also hear from pulmonologist Dr. Priya Balakrishnan about the impact of increased air pollution on the work of our lungs. And we explore the connections between good breathing and good listening, and how extractivist economies tend to suffocate b...

In this first episode of our second season, we speak with three artists and scientists who reach out beyond the atmosphere of our planet in distress: astrophotographer Gerhard Huedepohl, photography historian Katerina Korola, and astrophysicist Erika Grundstrom. Dedicated to the idea of marvelous transparency and luminosity, they remind us to be better stewards of our air on Earth. For more inform...

Amie Esslinger’s site-specific installation Holding Impact is currently on display in Cohen Memorial Hall on the campus of Vanderbilt University. In this program we hear from Amie and from Amanda Hellman, the director of Vanderbilt’s Art Gallery, about Amie’s artistic process, the probing questions Amie’s work asks about the relation of contemporary art and advanced science, the unique opportuniti...

This special edition of Art of Interference explores echoes between ancient rock and cave art and our contemporary moment. We feature the work of photographer Stephen Alvarez and visual artist Dustin Mater and discuss the role of non-profit organizations such as the Ancient Art Archive in preserving and educating the public about the oldest art on our planet. Steven and Dustin will join host Lutz...

In the final installment of Art of Interference ’s first season, we feature a contemplative conversation with Cannupa Hanska Luger, an artist of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara and Lakota heritage, who speaks with us about the practice of water protection. We also hear from curator Patricia Norby, who recently organized the Water Memories exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as Winona LaDuk...

“Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon,” wrote poet Edward Thomas in the trenches of the first World War. Today’s episode deals with two different sorts of grief: climate grief, as inspired by composer Jamie Perera’s Anthropocene in C Major , and pandemic grief, which he tackled in his follow-up project, Sonification . Today’s episode explores how we might utilize grief productively to mak...

In this week’s episode, the Art of Interference team explores the magic and allure of snow as a creative medium. We speak with international snow artist Simon Beck, whose large-scale snow-shoe drawings transform winter landscapes into geometric wonders. Environmental scientist George Duffy helps us to break down the science of snow and the various threats posed to snowy climes in an age of global...

“If one looks at a glacier long enough,” the Icelandic author Halldor Laxness once wrote, “words cease to have any meaning on this earth.” In this episode of Art of Interference , we put Laxness’s observation to the test. We meet Montreal-based artist Jessica Houston and climate scientist Bruno Tremblay to discuss Letter to the Future , a 1,000-year project collaborating with the ice in Antarctica...

For this episode musicologist Joy Calico joins Lutz Koepnick as co-host to discuss contemporary projects dedicated to the planet’s oceans in distress. We speak with Juliana Snapper and her collaborator Andrew Infanti about their unique opera, You Who Will Emerge from the Flood. A soprano who combines radical vocal techniques and improvisation, Snapper’s underwater performances not only push the op...

In this episode, we delve into the fascinating world of rivers as we talk to artist Carolina Caycedo, whose work contemplates human and river relationships by breaking down boundaries between activism and artmaking. Additionally, we discuss the destructive effects of damming with geomorphologist Frank Magilligan (Dartmouth), before further discussing Caycedo’s works with curator Carla Acevedo-Yate...

Our fourth episode takes a look under the hood of what we understand as interference. We feature the work of German artist and experimental musician Carsten Nicolai to discuss analogies between water and sound, acoustical and aquatic waves. We hear from Hawaiian scholar and surfer Karin Amimoto Ingersoll about the art of attuning one’s body to the waves of the ocean and communicating with the elem...