Earth 7: Grass

Last summer, host Lutz Koepnick traveled to Svalbard with filmmaker Jonathan Rattner and visual artist Jana Harper as part of a research project exploring art, climate change, and resilience in the Polar North. In this third episode devoted to the Svalbard experience, we explore what happens when art encounters geology—and what we can learn from artists and geologists about Svalbard’s rocks and what they might tell us about living in the present of deep time. Artist Jana Harper will join us again, along with geologists Lily Claiborne and Dan Morgan, and intellectual historian and literary critic Noah Heringman. Together, we’ll ask what rocks might teach us—not about Earth as a timeless entity, but about Earth as a timeful, living planet.For more information about she show, as well as the artists, the experts, the music, and additional materials featured in each episode, visit: https://artofinterference.com/

Last summer, host Lutz Koepnick traveled to Svalbard with filmmaker Jonathan Rattner and visual artist Jana Harper as part of a research project exploring art, climate change, and resilience in the Polar North. In this second of three episodes devoted to the Svalbard experience, Jana Harper reflects on the collages and color studies she created during her time in the Arctic and her efforts to make art that breaks with historical traditions of extraction. We also hear from Svalbard-based photographer Eva Grøndal; Charlotte (“Lotte”) Hetherington, the director of Artica; and Katrine Loen, co-founder of the Arctic World Archive, about different ways of imagining a future for the Arctic archipelago beyond its history of coal mining.For more information about she show, as well as the artists, the experts, the music, and additional materials featured in each episode, visit: https://artofinterference.com/

Host: Lutz KoepnickFor more than a century, coal mining shaped everyday life on Svalbard, one of the world’s northernmost inhabited places. Now that era is coming to an end as the Norwegian government decided to shut down the last mine. Last summer, host Lutz Koepnick had the opportunity to travel to Svalbard with filmmaker Jonathan Rattner and visual artist Jana Harper as part of a research project on art, resilience, and adaptation in the Polar North. Lutz watched the artists at work, talked with them about their practices, and spoke with other artists, curators, researchers, and residents about what role art might play in imagining life after coal. In this first of three episodes about the Svalbard experience, filmmaker Jonathan Rattner reflects on what it means to film in the Arctic without reproducing the extractive gaze that has so often shaped its representation. We also hear from people who know Svalbard intimately about how a century of coal mining—and the accelerating effects of climate change—continue to shape life on an archipelago undergoing profound transformation. For more information about she show, as well as the artists, the experts, the music, and additional materials featured in each episode, visit: https://artofinterference.com/

Host: Jennifer GutmanOn this episode of Art of Interference, we speak with British creative duo Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey about their pioneering grass portraits and the role of visual art in climate activism. We also talk with Vanderbilt professor Zee Tzankova and grassland conservationist Jeremy French about the environmental costs of chemically intensive lawncare and the importance of protecting and restoring critical grassland habitats. Grass may serve as the backdrop to summer picnics and kickball games, but the artists, scientists, and conservationists featured in this episode highlight the ways grass connects us to each other and to the basic, life-sustaining processes of all living things.For more information about she show, as well as the artists, the experts, the music, and additional materials featured in each episode, visit: https://artofinterference.com/

In this episode, we speak with New York–based artist Mary Mattingly about her work, including Swale, a floating food forest where people can freely gather berries, herbs, and other edible plants in a shared public space. Mary reflects on the practice of foraging, her projects exploring time and the materials that make art possible, and what plants, water, and soil can teach us. Co-hosts Sara Blaylock and Lutz Koepnick also speak with artists, critics, curators, and chefs about how foraging can inspire new approaches to art and challenge extractive ways of thinking.Co-Hosts: Sara Blaylock and Lutz KoepnickFor more information about she show, as well as the artists, the experts, the music, and additional materials featured in each episode, visit: https://artofinterference.com/

Hosts: Tori Hoover and Emma VendettaSalt: Homer called it “a divine substance.” Plato considered it as the element most dear to the gods, a distinction awarded for its central role in human life. Indeed, our bodies cannot function properly without it. But as the climate changes and warms and shifts in response to industrialization, the role of salt is shifting, too. Salts from human activity, like those in fertilizers and de-icers, are contaminating waterways and changing freshwater ecosystems, and rising seas encroach on freshwater territories as well. Today’s episode attempts to wrestle with the element’s broad and varied resonances through the work of sculptor Blane De St. Croix, with a particular emphasis on 2023’s “Salt Lake Excerpt.” We also talk with Professor Bill Hintz, an environmental scientist whose work at the University of Toledo revolves around the impact of road de-icing salts on freshwater ecosystems.    For more information about she show, as well as the artists, the experts, the music, and additional materials featured in each episode, visit: https://artofinterference.com/

Host: Lutz KoepnickIn today’s episode of Art of Interference we speak with Ursula Biemann, a Swiss artist based in Zurich. Her work over the last decades has explored forests in the Amazon and the Andes as critical engines of planetary life. In her widely exhibited films and installations Biemann continually seeks to bridge existing divides between Indigenous knowledge systems and Western science. We also hear from biologist and conservation ecologist Malu Jorge about the wonders of carrying out research in the rainforest, and from scholar Mark Anderson about the rights of nature movement and how Amazonian cosmologies emphasize the sociality and intelligence of nonhuman entities. For more information about she show, as well as the artists, the experts, the music, and additional materials featured in each episode, visit: https://artofinterference.com/

Soil is the foundation of life, but how often do we recognize it as such? On this episode of the Art of Interference, we speak with visual artist Allie Horick about her soil quilts—works that stitch together earth from family burial sites across Tennessee to tell a story of dispersed legacy and delicate connection. We also talk with regenerative farmer Maxwell Patterson and Vanderbilt professor Chris Vanags about the science of soil and the benefits of climate-smart agriculture. Whether used as a medium for art or growing, soil ecosystems show how variety, interconnectedness, and reciprocity sustain dynamic forms of life. Paying closer attention to this critical infrastructure has the power to transform people, communities, and the planet.Host: Jennifer GutmanFor more information about she show, as well as the artists, the experts, the music, and additional materials featured in each episode, visit: https://artofinterference.com/

In this episode of Art of Interference, we explore the medium of wood as a means of rethinking traditional ideas of human and nonhuman being amid a world of planetary emergencies. “People are really more like wood than we might think,” carpenter, artist, and scientist Seri Robinson insists in our conversation. Wood is influenced by the weather, by climate change, and by its proximate environments—and we, as humans have much to learn from it. And in our interview with artist Shinji Turner-Yamamoto, we discuss wood as an element that is deeply connected to memory, ritual, and spirituality. It is much more than just a useful resource, a lifeless object, or a pleasing decoration. It is a vibrant and essential element of life. Join us on this episode as we consider the deep time and ever-evolving role of wood.Host: Maren LovelandFor more information about she show, as well as the artists, the experts, the music, and additional materials featured in each episode, visit: https://artofinterference.com/

Lithium plays a key role in the green energy transition. Its extraction, however, comes at considerable costs for the environment and for local communities, particularly in the so-called lithium triangle in Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile. In this episode, we speak with artist and curator Guely Morató Loredo and her collaborator, sound artist Victor Mazón Gardoqui, about two projects that engage with the mining of lithium in South America today, its devastating impact on Indigenous people and sacred sites, and its connection to much older histories of colonial extraction. We also hear from social anthropologist Pablo Ampuero-Ruiz about the rise of electric cars, their reliance on lithium, and the need to develop new ideas of mobility; and from geochemist John Ayers about the challenging water-intense process of lithium extraction. Host: Lutz KoepnickFor more information about she show, as well as the artists, the experts, the music, and additional materials featured in each episode, visit: https://artofinterference.com/