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INTERDEPENDENCE

MediaLive, (May 2018)
curator

Cellular communication, undersea cables, AirDrop—technological networks are often invisible or taken for granted (despite that half of the world’s human population lives without access to the internet). But these are not the only multi-layered networks our species is knotted up in: Microorganisms in the human body outnumber our own cells, webs of mycelium sprawl underfoot (only occasionally producing the fruiting bodies we see as mushrooms), and the gravitational pull of the sun and moon quite literally shape the planet we share. Things becomes more complicated still when we are reminded that all of these, the human and nonhuman made, are continuously interfacing in new ways. The osprey that live in the cell towers, the microchips implanted in companion animals, and the cliff swallows who use bridges as architectural supports for nests—each remind us that everything is ‘natural’ and connected. Interdependence accounted for how, at every scale, human animals are embedded within sets of nested and dependent interactions.

Interdependence was the 2018 edition of MediaLive, an annual international festival of media arts and culture at Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA), which I curated from 2016-2021. The festival, which includes an exhibition, performances, screenings, workshops, panel discussions, and other events, takes place at BMoCA as well as in multiple venues throughout the city of Boulder. It draws an average of over 2,000 visitors annually and, during my tenure, garnered hundreds of individual mentions in intenrational, national, and local publications, including: The Guardian, Vanity Fair, NY Magazine, Colorado Public Radio, ARTNET, USA Today, New York Daily News, NME Magazine, VICE Media, CBS News, The Today Show, GQ Magazine, and the Huffington Post.

Artists: Liat Berdugo, Faith Holland, Hyphen-Labs, Nullsleep, Sound of Ceres, Joel Swanson, Pinar Yoldas, and members of the Denver Philharmonic Orchestra and Boulder Symphony

Researchers: Liz Allen, Laura Devendorf, Brianna Dym, and Jen Liu

Commissioned work:
Sound of Ceres + members of Denver Philharmonic & Boulder Symphony, Orchestral (2018)