THE COMMITTEE ON INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE STUDIES PRESENTS
JACKIE BROOKNER
Transdisciplinarity and Porosity
October 5th, 4:15-5:30
Room 5307 | The CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Free and open to the public
Part of the Multispecies Salon Wednesday Speaker Series [1]
[2]Transdisciplinarity implicitly raises the issue of boundaries, which themselves are a rich territory to explore. What happens when one meets the edges of their expertise? These initially uncomfortable edges become fecund places of emergent creativity, similar to enhanced diversity in the boundary zones of ecosystems. Ecological artist Jackie Brookner will explore the richness of transdisciplinarity in ecological restoration projects initiated through art practice. Using examples of her water remediation/ public art projects where she collaborates with ecologists, hydrologists, engineers, landscape architects, communities and policy makers, she will discuss the metaphorical implications of permeable boundaries.
Jackie Brookner is an ecological artist who collaborates with ecologists, design professionals, communities, and policy makers to create water remediation/public art projects for wetlands, rivers, streams, and stormwater runoff. These projects demonstrate how the undervalued resources of stormwater and other polluted water can be reclaimed and used to create lush environments, expressive and multifunctional public spaces. Her living sculptures, called BiosculpturesTM, are evocative, plant based systems that clean polluted water, integrating ecological revitalization with the conceptual, metaphoric, and aesthetic capacities of sculpture. These projects raise community awareness of the urgency of restoring health to aquatic ecosystems, encourage the necessary imagining of a world where human and other than human systems are mutually beneficial, and help create the public will to protect and restore these resources.