Danielle Siembieda employs emerging technologies as a new media artist to explore the sublime entanglement of humankind, nature, and technology, as revealed specifically by the climate crisis and recent radical innovations in science. Her work is a form of cyborg-eco-feminist, science-fiction, rooted in real discoveries, that works to articulate new hybrid forms of living and being at these liminal borders. It is interdisciplinary and collaborative, an engaged form of social practice, which draws upon diverse voices and expertise while making direct, practical contributions to civic life.
Her Refuge in Refuse: Homesteading in Art and Culture Project, included in this show, is a multi-disciplinary archive, which combines augmented reality, sound, sculpture, video, photography, and 3D imagery - along with the tools of urban planning - to document an historical community of people, who homesteaded for decades on a decommissioned shoreline dump in Albany, CA. The work speaks to the plight of displaced people, the collaborative invention in their resilience under marginalized conditions, and the model they provide for living at the boundary between nature and society in a state of crisis.
The works in Siembieda’s Post People Possibilities series combine bio art, maker tech, and toys to explore the synthetic potential at the intersections between art and politics, science and fantasy, nature and technology. The works are informed by an understanding that what we build now sets the foundations for how we survive in the future. Our state of nature will be determined by the politics of our social forms, the truths revealed by our knowledge and understanding, and our capacity to re-imagine our relationship with our environment. Lizard Lab presents a Jurraisic Park fantasy of dinosaurs, artificially restored from extinction and running amok. Cooperative Co-Existence depicts humankind living in conjunction with natural phenomena: magnets, ice, animals. Siembieda’s digital avatar Jean Gnome, playfully explores the fluid nature of identity in the age of social media and genomics.
Finally, The Flyline presents the architectural model of a regenerative micro-grid renewable energy system, walking path, and performance platform, designed for Fly Ranch, the future site of a Burning Man community village. The piece combines art, architecture, landscape design, and social practice to imagine possible ways of living with conscious attention to our interdependence with the natural world.