Natalie Jeremijenko is an artist and engineer who directs the xdesign Environmental Health Clinic at NYU. Previously she was on the Visual Arts faculty at UCSD, and Faculty of Engineering at Yale. Her work was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial of American Art (also in 1997) and the Cooper Hewit Smithsonian Design Triennial 2006-7. She has a permanently installed Model Urban Development on the roof of Postmasters Gallery in Chelsea, featuring 7 residential housing developments, concert hall, and other public amenities, powered by human food waste where it continues to toy with new conceptions of urban futures, and re-imagine our relationship to nonhuman organisms. Her work is described as experimental design, hence xDesign, as it explores the opportunity new technologies present for non violent social change. Her research centers on structures of participation in the production of knowledge, and information and the political and social possibilities (and limitations) of information and emerging technologies — mostly through public experiments. In this vein, her work spans a range of media from statistical indices (such as the Despondency Index, which linked the Dow Jones to the suicide rate at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge) to biological substrates (such as the installations of cloned trees in pairs in various urban micro-climates) to robotics (such as the development of feral robotic dog packs to investigate environmental hazards). The Environmental Health Clinic develops and prescribes locally optimized and often playful strategies to effect remediation of environmental systems, producing measurable and mediagenic evidence, and coordination diverse projects to effective material change. (Source: NYU Steinhard Faculty Bio).
SYNAPSE: How does your practice – as an artist and a scientist – differ in its goals from those of an urban planner, architect or an engineer?
NJ: My work is set up in opposition to the idea that some planner, architect, or engineer has a monopoly on what and how we design our cities and our shared environmental commons (and monopolies the resources and public funds for doing so). I develop alternative criteria and oppose the goals and institutional logic of planners and particularly engineers, as a systems engineer by training. Part of my work is to develop representations that show different institutional framework, logic in addition to presenting a desirable …. I don’t agree with the rban planner criteria but they cannot be opposed to improving health. Moreover, and the service structure of engineers and architectural professions desperately limits what and for whom they design. I also oppose formulaic ideas will promote “behavior change” as if we are robots that can be reprogrammed. In the US this idea is usually framed in somewhat-heroic -consumer speak: there are 10 things you can do to “save the world”, like changing a lightbuld, recycling shopping bags or buy local lettuces, etc., Everyone knows that changing a light bulb is necessary but radically insufficient. A new report just out on a huge Swedish experiment with thousands of energy meters in private homes, five different incentive strategies and marketing campaigns, that proudly boasted it had achieved a 12% energy saving. These kinds of incremental changes that don’t really re-imagine one’s life, they are necessary but insufficient (and really just about deprivation rather than producing a desireable future.
SYNAPSE: What is the alternative?
NJ: In the tradition of institutional critique I am developing an alternative institution (xClinic, but also OOZ, the Cross(x)Species Adventure Club, Farmacy and HSIM) as a way of working on or redesiging/reimagining our shared urban environments. The service structure of architecture and engineering design professions limits what and to whom they are accountable. These professions are not accountable to community health and environmental performance, for instance, (landscape architecture is an imagistic profession too) nor are they necessarily embedded in community for ongoing monitoring and adaptation–whereas both xClinic, OOZ and other structures of participation I work on/as are specifically accountable and involve local constituents in the initial value proposition and the ongoing evaluation/adaptation. Given that there is little experiment and less empiricism that drives the by-definition topdown urban planning activities I see them as cultural/technological fiction writers sans interesting plots, sans even compelling McGuffins, and in the queasy realm of futurology – I haven’t seen a single Urban Planning process I like (though I was one of 4 artist led teams to develop urban plans for Long Island City). Frankly I am tempted to spend more time critiquing engineering (there are few engineering critics…. who are actually critical, and not just dazzled by scale, budget and chutzpah) bc they are just such inadequate structures of accountability.
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SYNAPSE: Much of work your artistic practice focuses on ways of addressing the public, or give awareness to certain kinds of phenomena, or for example to enable social change. How has the notion of the ‘public’ changed throughout your artistic practice?
NJ: The “public” has disintegrated into very specific individuals, and small groups, or impatients. The disintegration of the public is part of the crisis of agency, which is not necessarily the atomization and individualization of risk and concern. It does disambiguate how and who can act — and suggests more specific aggregates or impatients who are bound by shared material conditions of our environmental commons.
These fragments of public are every bit as specific as a particular “collector” in the art world context, limited by their own resources and concerns. in xclinic the person/impatient attends to address their own questions and immediate concerns, voluntarily and self initiated, not unlike like when someone goes to the doctor. Although at the xClinic we codeveloped things people can do to treat that concern and improve environmental health, whereas in a medical clinic u are likely to leave with a prescription for a pharamaceutical
SYNAPSE: What does the ‘x’ stand for in projects like “XClinic” and “XDesign”?
NJ: The ‘x’ locates it in specific local experiment. X marks the spot on the territory …. in xClinic – I like camelcase, even though it offend the more literary, it is the mark of programmers – it is short for ‘environmental health clinic’ which functions both as a deadpan generalizable institutional context that one cannot abstract from local environmental conditions. I just launched a new xClinic in Manchester with a phenological xperiment.
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SYNAPSE: Do you see much of a precedent for this kind of fusion – between art and science – in the history of science, or the history of art? Who are your influences?
NJ: Science studies as an academic discipline has been a tremendous influence treating science as culture but I am equally interested is treating culture as science like computational linguistics or the legacy of AI and cybernetics. I am infected by the earnestness of the engineering–why I went into it rather than the anthropological stance of studying it (in Science Studies tradition)…. I was attracted to the chutspah of using intellectual/theoretical ideas and new technologies as an opportunity to address pressing social and environmental issues. I find earnest-ness much more appealing as a stance than cool irony, or even the critical remove, hence using our own lifestyles as lifestyle experiments. which is consistent with the “life as art” paradigm in contemporary practices.
All of my students are required to do a self-designed lifestyle experiments that measurably improves environmental health.
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“Look & Feel”(2003), at de Verbeelding art landscape nature, Zeewolde, Netherlands (Source: xDesign, NYU)
SYNAPSE: Tell me about the environmental health clinic.
I call them ‘impatient’ because they’re too impatient to wait for legal and legeslative wranglings… such as in the case of cleaning up the Hudson River, for example, you know that took 30 years. The cleanup effort is uninformed and not only inadequate, but it is also making the problem worse. The bioaccumulation of fish has steadily been going down in the past fifteen years. Not only is it wrong, it verges on immoral. As an environmental strategy this paradigm of suing the deep pockets – in this case GE was only one of the companies that contaminated the river – it happens to be the one that’s still around, and has deep pockets. This idea that you go wrangling for thirty years and then task someone to do the cleanup – and the number of good, young minds involved… The number 1 concern of students coming into NYU is the environment – they could care less about the war, and even student debt. The environment as a topic of research pulls young people. But they think they need to go into environmental law, which is usually unimaginative and a great waste of the young, interesting minds.
The environmental health clinic is twisting the definition of health from an internal, atomized, medicalized, genetically predetermined view of health into an external, shared, environmental view of health.
In the tradition of institutional critique – xClinic is a very specific critique of the medicalization of health. Hippocrates himself said that the better part of health lies outside the body – to treat the inner we have to treat the outer. In this kind of Hippocratic strategy is a critique of how we’ve formulated health. We can take environmental questions and see how they affect health. And I think that that’s a compelling metric. It’s a collective formulation of our shared environmental commons. It’s in my interest, and its in your interest too, to improve your environmental health. And this makes it a very different kind of framework than global circulation models – of nature being ‘out there’, climate being ‘out there’, but instead really grounding it in one’s own health and urban symptoms. Which, I would argue, has a great advantage in that – you can act on it. It’s in your own interest to.
The globalization of discourse around the environment has the unfortunate consequence of making it feel like you can’t do anything – that you can’t act.
In the east river, I’ve been building an alternative way of addressing the contaminants: aggregating small actions of many people motivated by their own one-day interest and engagement into collective action, collective remediative action that is not about making anyone follow – not about provoking ‘behavior change.’
SYNAPSE: Why unimaginative?
NJ: I just think it’s a strategy that’s empty now. In fact, cleaning up these large industrial contaminants…that’s one issue, but it’s not the only issue. But with the structure, and the professional structure, of law, that’s all they can do – is act on regulating companies. I don’t think the strategies are appropriate for the issues we’re facing today.
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Twoilets: Toilets for Birds (Source: xDesign, NYU)
SYNAPSE: How do you generally like to frame your work discursively? Any insights as to what you’ll be discussing during the SYNAPSE conference this april?
NJ: I usually start my talk showing why I frame environmental issues as health issues and health issues as environmental issues. To address what I call the crisis of agency – which is, what to do? As an individual, as a collective, as an institution, so I think that this question of what to do is open. changing a light bulb, recycling your shopping bags…again, radically insufficient. And I think this is a shared cultural feeling – this crisis of agency.
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Natalie Jeremijenko Source: NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development