Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg - BETTER NATURE

Описание: 21.10.2021
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg - BETTER NATURE

DR ALEXANDRA DAISY GINSBERG is an artist examining our fraught relationships with nature and technology. Through artworks, writing, and curatorial projects, Daisy’s work explores subjects as diverse as artificial intelligence, exobiology, synthetic biology, conservation, biodiversity, and evolution, as she investigates the human impulse to “better” the world. But what does better mean? Who is it better for? And who gets to decide? Ginsberg will address these questions through discussion of some of her recent artworks, including resurrecting the smell of extinct flowers (now on view at the Natural History Museum Bern) and her upcoming commission for pollinators at the Eden Project Cornwall. As humanity slowly acknowledges the impact of our progress on the natural world, and the need to make a damaged nature better, we have to ask: what does better mean?

She has spent over ten years experimentally engaging with the field of synthetic biology, developing new roles for artists and designers. She is lead author of Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology’s Designs on Nature (MIT Press, 2014), and in 2017 completed Better, her PhD by practice, at London’s Royal College of Art (RCA), interrogating how powerful dreams of “better” futures shape the things that get designed. She read architecture at the University of Cambridge, was a visiting scholar at Harvard University, and received her MA in Design Interactions from the RCA.

The lecture is part of the talk series MY SPECIES within the core course Architecture of Territory: Territorial Design in Histories, Theories, and Projects.

CONCEPT AND REALISATION
Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning, ETH Zurich Department of Architecture
Prof. Milica Topalović
Dr. Nazlı Tümerdem

VIDEO EDITING
Qianer Zhu

GRAPHIC DESIGN
Goda Budvytyte

BOOK BINDING
Michiel Gieben

This lecture series sets up an agenda for widening the disciplinary field of architecture and urbanism from their focus on the city, or the urban in the narrow sense, to wider territorial scales, which correspond to the increasing scales of contemporary urbanisation. It discusses the concepts of territory and urbanisation, and their implications for the work of architects and urbanists.

MY $PECIES
Within the theme My Species, the four guest speakers (Feifei Zhou, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Florianne Koechlin, and Oxana Timofeeva) engaged in fields ranging from art and landscape representation to bioethics and environmental philosophy, will approach territory through the notions such as multispecies, coexistence, and diversity. With a more-than-human perspective on the territory, the guest speakers will elaborate their take on “telling horrible stories in beautiful ways,” debate “the dignity of plants,” expound upon “mankind’s fascination to better the world,” and confer “the non-human turn” and what is to come after.

The course will enable students to critically discuss concepts of territory and urbanisation. It will invite students to revisit the history of architects’ work engaging with the problematic of urbanising territories and territorial organisation. The goal is to motivate and equip students to engage with territory in the present day and age, by setting out our contemporary urban agenda. The lectures are animated by a series of visual and conceptual exercises, usually on A4 sheets of paper. All original student contributions will be collected and bound together, creating a unique book-object. Some of the exercises are graded and count as proof of completion.