atlanta arts tagged interest

In 2020, I first encountered Nancy Baker Cahill as an artist reconfiguring public and land art alongside emerging technologies. Prevailing models of land art sketch spaces of masculinist endeavor that reproduce the logic of coloniality. Those models call to mind subtractive gestures that carve out natural terrain, or additive maneuvers—ones that alter local ecologies. Public art, in turn, often invokes the severity and massive scale of, for example, a 120-foot-long and 12-foot-high steel plate.

By contrast, Cahill’s practice opens up space for feminist interventions rendered virtually, and without physically modifying a given environment. This observation is not to suggest that emerging technologies are absent their own environmental impacts, and Cahill has been a vocal proponent of recalibrating our relationship to these technologies away from one of ecological harm. In 2023, Cahill responded to the overturning of Roe v. Wade with State Property, an exploding uterus rendered in augmented reality (AR), condemning the state violence of withholding reproductive justice and bodily autonomy.

Throughout her singular practice, Cahill deploys emerging technologies toward ecofeminist worldbuilding. She invites viewers to co-create worlds toward which we might aspire. Cahill and I sat down to discuss her recent projects—CENTO (October 2023–ongoing) at the Whitney Museum of American Art; her survey exhibition, Through Lines, at the Georgia Museum of Art (October 28, 2023–May 19, 2024); and her forthcoming project, SEEK, at Cosm in Los Angeles (July 29–August 22, 2024).

Mashinka Firunts Hakopian: CENTO has been described as part mycelium, part cephalopod, part marine animal, part serpent, part bird, and part machine. You’ve also called it a holobiont. All of these are concepts that come with robust histories and theoretical scaffolding. I know that your work is densely research-based and laden with layers of reference. I’d love to open by hearing about the sources that inform the contours of CENTO in particular.

Nancy Baker Cahill: A cento is a poetic device that allows a writer to borrow phrases from one or multiple poems to create, essentially, a collage poem. CENTO itself is not just a collage poem of species but also a cento of influences and, ultimately, a cento of all the people who engage with it and contribute to its co-creation. I would, of course, initially cite Donna Haraway and her concept of the urgency of co-creation, sympoiesis, or “co-making” in a troubled time.

I draw a lot of inspiration from the speculative fiction of Jeff VanderMeer. Most notably, Borne, Annihilation, and The Strange Bird, all of which imagine a dystopic future with a number of bio-engineered future creatures. To me, this became a poetic container for—or an invitation, I should say—to imagine what a transspeciated future creature would look like. Which attributes would it have? Which species would it include? How might interspecies collaboration actually work?

I’ll also cite the poetic influence of Rosi Braidotti, and the idea of an embrained holobiont: a nonhierarchical structure that doesn’t allow one species to dominate another but contains multiple, co-existing, and communicating species. I see it as a potential guide and alternate imagining of how we could conceivably survive imperiled futures by decentering ourselves. Although we can’t really define the human, we certainly can acknowledge the blurring of lines, the ways in which we are embedded in nature, and nature is embedded in us. And that any claim to the contrary leads to the position we find ourselves in, in this moment of climate crisis. Another key influence would be Robin Wall Kimmerer and her book Braiding Sweetgrass, which I cannot shake from my imagination. This idea, as she so eloquently states, that “paying attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world,” and that paying attention requires not just humility but also an openness to learning, to seeing, to listening, to a different type of sensorial engagement with the world. And, more than ever, as our lives are so technologically mediated, that seems to be one path that we could consider if we want to essentially reject the failed models—whether civic models, economic models, or cultural models—that have brought us to this moment of enormous complexity and despair and destruction.

MFH: You’ve discussed CENTO as a response to the fact that new forms of ecological thinking are urgently required of artists in the present. How do you see the role of a project like this one in the development of new ecological imaginaries?

NBC: We are living through ecological collapse, ecocide. The question of how we navigate that is an urgent one. One of my favorite curators, Alice Gray Stites, gave me Santiago Zabala’s book Why Only Art Can Save Us, which claims that one emergency is that there’s no sense of emergency. I do think that many people feel their concerns have been blunted and have become inured to urgency. But it feels antipodal. You have apathy on the one end, and then you have an over-invested interest in everything all the time—a feeling that one needs to respond to everything, having to perform feelings online, byproducts of what philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls psychopolitics, social media ensuring its users are “auto-exploiting subjects.” Zabala’s argument is that this condition requires art as an event, a thing that shocks “us,” the thing that interpolates “us” into itself, and we become a part of it. And so, that, too, informs one of my hopes for CENTO—that it models how we might contribute constructively to a larger body politic, which is also part of civic imagination, not just ecological imagination.

MFH: You brought up networks of care, and CENTO seems to be a study in what Anna Tsing calls multispecies assemblage, and it invites us into forms of multispecies kinship.

NBC: Yes. There’s a term that Nora Bateson came up with, mutual learning through “simultaneous implicating.” When she imagines ecological community, her emphasis is on communication. Because how can you coexist, how can you collaborate, how can you co-create without communication? In simultaneous implicating, we acknowledge that we are part of the same system, but we communicate differently, and then we learn from each other, which is an essential component of kinship, along with deep humility.

What really has brought this idea home for me is the scholarship of Karen Bakker, who studies bioacoustics and eco-acoustics, and deals critically with the potential of AI to aid that study. And one of the things I love about her scholarship is that she’s equally attentive to already long-established sources of Indigenous wisdom and to the emergent potential of machine learning.

As Bakker’s study of bioacoustics relates to CENTO, the “head” of the creature—which is not privileged as the brain—is just one part of the creature, because the entire body is “embrained” and made up of multiple intelligences. But the head of the creature is the machine part. What I imagine is that the machine allows for fluid translation and communication between and among these different intelligences, different languages.

Because, of course, language is itself a technology, as we know. And one of the things that I found most compelling about Bakker’s research is understanding the ways in which we, as humans, are so limited in what we can hear or discern. Whereas whales and elephants communicate through infrasound, where sound travels across miles, through solid objects and at a different speed. [She writes that] there have been numerous Indigenous leaders who have learned to not just communicate, for example, with whales, but to identify, by sound, which whales they’re communicating with.

Bats and bees can communicate through infrasound. And coral—the fact that coral communicates through sound! And there’s some controversial evidence that plants can communicate. All of that, in aggregate, to me, offers an opportunity to really step back and to decenter our knowledge, our presumed intelligence, our languages. And so, CENTO is an invitation to consider a few of those things.

NBC: I love that provocation. One thing that I’ve had to grapple with more recently, and certainly since the curator approached me about this show, was how to interrogate the connection between drawing and digital imagery. What is the connection between drawing and cinema? What is the connection between drawing and VR, drawing and AR?

When I think back to being an undergraduate, I basically made two bodies of work, and they were my twin stars. They were drawing and video. I never felt called to painting. I think that drawing is connected to time, and obviously it’s connected to emotion and mark-making, but it represents decision-making as recorded, in some cases, on a flat surface, as recorded in 3-D space as movement, as gesture, as performance.

VR occupies this special ontological space. My friend Noah Nelson, who has an XR podcast called No Proscenium, cites writer Zay Amesbury, who refers to it as “ontological vertigo.” And I think that drawing and line allow us to explore a lot of those questions that are related to consciousness. And also, for me, it’s always provided a certain connective tissue—the way the gesture is made, the way the mark is made, inscribes some visceral emotion, some feeling that perhaps the viewer also feels.

What I’m especially excited to share in my own practice is a process of mutation, translation, and mediation. And so, what we’re really doing is tracing a trajectory of lines on—in this case, paper—but let’s say just a wall. I take those drawings, tear them into 3-D objects, then combine and recombine them into immersive 3-D sculpture. I use the older methods of photogrammetry combined with AI software to map my sculptures. It’s a process of translation. In this ship-of-Theseus odyssey, the now 3-D digital sculptures get subjected to 3-D software, where I can play outside of any “normal” laws of physics and lighting. Sometimes, video stills of these animations are printed as fine art prints—a long journey from graphite drawing on paper, through a variety of mutative processes back, ultimately, to paper. What of the original remains? That seems to be a very important question to me, because the line has continued throughout all of it.

It makes sense to me that the next step on that trajectory, at least for now, in this moment in space-time, is augmented reality—where the translation, that process of embodied mark-making then literally occupies what we would call shared, immersive space. Which is to say, the space we are in.

MFH: A final question: your next project is a collaboration with Cosm and set to be displayed in an LED dome. You’ve described that project as an experiment in prompting deeper sensorial engagement for the viewer, inspired in part by media scholar Hanna Rose Shell’s idea of camouflage consciousness. What can you share about this work?

NBC: One source of inspiration has been the book Quantum Listening by Pauline Oliveros. In a nutshell, she suggests that quantum listening is listening to more than one reality simultaneously. This, to me, is also a part of the project of the moment we’re in—that maybe we could train ourselves to listen. To the whisper of the trees, the bubbling of the fountain.

I thought, why not present multiple elemental scenarios: fire, water, sand, and wind, and forest, and offer a kind of journey through each of those elements. One of the things that I loved about Shell’s book is when she writes, “Camouflage is thus, in its essence, both creative and productive. It is both a logic and a poetic.” And that, to me, is the whole project, along with quantum listening. What happens when we look more closely, when we look more deeply? What do we see in the patterns? What do we imagine in the patterns? Shell talks about Len Lye’s film practice, and this idea that you would dissolve the interface between the viewer, the filmmaker, and the imagery—so that the membrane becomes entirely porous and almost invisible. And that’s essentially like VR without a headset. You’re entirely enveloped in this arena, which allows for a shift in consciousness, one hopes.

My greatest hope is that it will be moving enough and engaging enough and transformative enough that you might leave and look a little bit differently, listen a little bit differently, as you move through the world. That would be the ultimate outcome for me, to move through the world with a kind of exquisite sensitivity to it. That’s what that project is.

MFH: I’ve yet to encounter a work of yours that doesn’t attune the viewer to exquisite sensitivities.

NBC: Oh, thank you.

I wanted to mention a concept from Nora Bateson, who refers to the biosphere as a semiosphere. And I think of that, also, as a kind of guiding principle, a touchstone, to keep going back to. What are the signs? What are we seeing? What are we missing? What might we discover again, from a place of great humility and care? What if we approached the more-than-human world from a place of curiosity versus entrenched conviction? Even more, what if we applied such compassion to other humans? That would be genuinely radical in the highly profitable and increasingly accepted cult/ure of cruelty in the United States.

Lately, I’ve thought of Elaine Scarry’s book The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. In it (I paraphrase), she notes that what enables humans to torture other humans is that they quite literally cannot feel one another’s pain; pain itself is inexpressible, voiceless. She writes, “Intense pain is language-destroying.” I think a lot about voicelessness now. There is a self-annihilating death cult afoot, and it has taken aim at the world’s most vulnerable populations. Here in the US, it manifests in the kind of asymmetrical economic influence that allows Supreme Court Justices to be bought for an RV and fancy vacations; in the overturning of Roe v. Wade and an ongoing campaign to revive Civil War–era laws to abolish contraception; in people with life-threatening pregnancy complications being turned away by doctors over fear of being incarcerated; in unapologetic flouting of the Voting Rights Act through court-sanctioned racialized redistricting; in the new MAGA slogan, “Take America Back Again”; in the passing of shamelessly bigoted anti-trans legislation; in the tentacular judicial and pedagogical reach of white christian nationalism; in the silencing of state workers who dare not utter the words “abortion” or “gay” aloud for risk of being fired or imprisoned; in the violent crackdowns and arrests of students and professors peacefully protesting the genocide in Gaza.