Mashed, Meme’d, Mixed, and Mulched

We are in the muck. Today’s ultra-digitized, stuff-saturated world is exhilarating and exhausting. Media inputs and outputs result in a web of ontological connections so dense that we have become fully and inescapably enveloped in them. To free ourselves we must revel in everything and everything, from ecological systems to their technological doppelgangers, the material to the ineffable, the natural world to the human to the post-human. Or, to steal a term from Donna Hararway, composthuman. Mashed, Meme’d, Mixed, and Mulched celebrates practices that take refuge in this mess, that showcase the very nature of its messiness, and reject traditional, humanistic impulses to tidy up, problem solve, or conquer.

Mashed, Meme’d, Mixed, and Mulched features environmental artist Lauren Bon, Jesse Sanes’ collaborative project Free the Land, science fiction artist and body architect Lucy McCrae, and polydisciplinary life-artist Jennifer Moon. Please join us on December 1, 2020 from 4-6pm for presentations from each of the participants, an exchange of ideas, and breakout rooms.

Curated by MDP’s Mashed, Meme’d, Mixed, and Mulched Working Group led by Mimi Zeiger in Spring 2020, with Maxwell Chen, Adit Dhanushkodi, Julia Echevarria, and Karina J. Hernández.

Organized and moderated by MDP students Alan Amaya, Blake Kos, Kate Ladenheim, and Christie Wu.

Lauren Bon is an environmental artist from Los Angeles, CA. Her practice, Metabolic Studio, explores self-sustaining and self-diversifying systems of exchange that feed emergent properties that regenerate the life web. Some of her works include: Not A Cornfield, which transformed and revived an industrial brownfield in downtown Los Angeles into a thirty-two-acre cornfield for one agricultural cycle; 100 Mules Walking the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a 240-mile performative action that aimed to reconnect the city of Los Angeles with the source of its water for the centenary of the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Her studio’s current work, Bending the River Back into the City, aims to utilize Los Angeles’ first private water right to deliver 106-acre feet of water annually from the LA River to over 50 acres of land in the historic core of downtown LA. This model can be replicated to regenerate the 52-mile LA River, reconnect it to its floodplain and form a citizens’ utility.

Free The Land is an evolving collaborative project initiated in 2013 by Jesse Sanes. A media diary of environmental impressions natural and domestic, it has manifested in print, collage work, soundmap contributions, guerrilla internet performance, live electronics, sculpture and immersive audio and visual installation. In equal measures exploratory and earnest, FTL pulls field recordings, found material, and digital media into a compost of synthesis and free manipulation. Jesse is joined by collaborators Aaron Miller Rehm and Henrik Söderström.

Lucy McRae is a science fiction artist, filmmaker, inventor and body architect. Her work speculates on the future of human existence by exploring the limits of the body, beauty, biotechnology and the self. McRae works across installation, film, photography, artificial intelligence and edible technology. She is regarded as a pioneer who blurs the boundaries across art, architecture, design and technology with a healthy disregard for labels that limit interdisciplinary practice. McRae has exhibited at MIT, Ars Electronica, NASA, Science Museum London, Centre Pompidou, and the Venice Biennale. She is a visiting professor at SCI_Arc in Los Angeles; and is recognised as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.

Jennifer Moon is a polydisciplinary life-artist whose work investigates organizing systems (social systems, institutional structures, power relations, scientific theories, emotional frameworks, etc.) and how these various systems are entangled, co-constituted, performed, and perpetuated through bodies (human, nonhuman, material, immaterial). Playfully pushing unlikely configurations—a book of Moon’s obsessive crushes in the style of Dungeon & Dragons Monster Manual; approaching the topic of incest with their family in a virtual world; repurposing Disney songs to inspire revolution—Moon’s work mobilizes potential to reconfigure our relationship to power, to reignite the social and political imaginaries, and to stimulate change beyond binaries, hierarchies, and capital.