Sabotage, Implementation, and Expanded Geo-engineering: An Interview with Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne on Collaborative Practice

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A black set of scales on a gradient background. The scales are balanced by two collaged globes.
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Published: Apr 18, 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21900/j.median.v21i1.1897

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Tega Brain
New York University
Sam Lavigne
Parsons School of Design
Corinna Kirsch
Pratt Institute
Rebecca Uliasz
University of Michigan

Abstract

Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne have made more critical interventions into fossil fuel capitalism than possibly any other artists or climate activists working with digital media today. In transforming digital tools away from their intended commercial use, they have calculated carbon offsets based on pipeline disruption (Offset, 2023–ongoing), made botnets that swarm climate change news articles (Synthetic Messenger, 2021), and redistributed grant funding to incarcerated climate activists (Fragile States, 2022). In addition to their visual projects, Brain and Lavigne have both published widely on their work, from creative re-envisionings of the LaTex white paper to more formal statements on their theories and methods (“All That Is Air Melts Into Air,” e-flux Architecture, 2024). In this interview with the guest editors of the “Media and Climate” special issue, Brain and Lavigne discuss the aforementioned projects, as well as how their practices are informed by data activism, alternative methods for technology under capitalism, and providing models and interventions that reach beyond the art world.

Article Details

Issue
Vol. 21 No. 1 (2025): As the World Burns: On Media and Climate
Section
Interviews
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Author Biographies

Tega Brain, New York University

Tega Brain is an Australian artist and environmental engineer, born when atmospheric CO2 was below 350ppm. Her work addresses issues of ecology, data, automation, and infrastructure. She is an Industry Associate Professor of Integrated Design and Media at New York University and her first book, Code as Creative Medium, is co-authored with Golan Levin and published with MIT Press. She lives and works in New York.

Sam Lavigne, Parsons School of Design

Sam Lavigne is an artist and programmer whose work explores issues around data, surveillance, policing and automation. He has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues like the Whitney Museum, Lincoln Center, the New Museum, Ars Electronica, and IDFA DocLab. He was formerly a Magic Grant fellow at the Brown Institute at Columbia University and Special Projects editor at the New Inquiry Magazine. He is currently the Assistant Professor of Synthetic Media and Algorithmic Justice at Parsons School of Design.

Corinna Kirsch, Pratt Institute

Corinna Kirsch is a historian of art, environment, and computation, specializing in systems and intermedia art practices of the 1960s and 1970s and their afterlives in present-day forms of digital media, art, and activism. Her academic writing has appeared in Art Journal, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, and Panorama. She holds a PhD in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Rebecca Uliasz, University of Michigan

Rebecca Uliasz is a scholar and artist whose work centers on the links between digital media, critical theory, and the history of technology and the human sciences, with an emphasis on environmental issues. Her academic writing, art, and performance work have appeared in Springer AI & Society, Review of Communication, Journal of Networked Music and Arts, The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory, and transmediale. She holds a PhD in Computational Media, Arts & Cultures from Duke University and an MFA from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and is one half of the computational aesthetics research collective Governance.