Beatriz da Costa: (un)disciplinary tactics
curated by Daniela Lieja Quintanar with Ana Briz
as part of PST ART: Art and Science Collide
Presented at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery
4800 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90027
Opening reception: Saturday, September 7, 2024, 1 PM
Exhibition dates: September 7, 2024–January 5, 2025
Gallery hours: Thursday-Sunday 11 AM–4 PM
Beatriz da Costa: (un)disciplinary tactics revisits the collaborative artistic practice of the late Beatriz da Costa (1974-2012) as an investigation into technoscientific experimentation, politics, activism, and art-making, contextualized for our contemporary moment. da Costa’s unique models of inter- and un-disciplinary public interventions, workshops, and critical writing foreground and amplify the ongoing social struggles for sustaining life. Beatriz da Costa: (un)disciplinary tactics explores how da Costa’s deep reflections on life and extinction, health and wellness, environmental issues, cancer and chronic illness, socio-political autonomy, and interspecies cohabitation remain relevant to our societal issues at hand today. da Costa’s research and art-making addresses art and technoscience alongside ancient and non-academic forms of knowledge. In that spirit, this project weaves together an exhibition, publication, public programming, performances, educational workshops, and study groups as an evocation of da Costa’s approach to the theory of tactical biopolitics. Tactical biopolitics engages technoscience, everyday life, history, culture, the academy, and the public to distribute collective knowledge while challenging societal norms and capitalist structures. This radical methodology reclaims collective power to ensure and maintain life through tactics as a form of resistance to hegemonic powers.
This exhibition is complemented by a publication surveying da Costa’s entire artistic career with curatorial essays, reflections from previous collaborators including Donna Haraway and Robert F. Nideffer, and more. The exhibition publication is the most extensive analysis of da Costa’s practice to date, and is distributed by MIT Press. Publication preorders are now available at this link.
Beatriz da Costa (June 11, 1974–December 27, 2012) was an interdisciplinary artist and tactical media practitioner working at the intersection of contemporary art, science, engineering, and politics. Her work takes the form of public participatory interventions, locative media, conceptual tool building, and critical writing. Issues addressed in her work include the use of emergent technologies to investigate context-specific configurations of social injustice, the politics of transgenic organisms, and the social repercussions of ubiquitous surveillance technologies. The artist made frequent use of “wetware” in her projects, and in her late work she became interested in the potential of interspecies co-production in promoting the responsible use of natural resources and environmental sustainability. Through her work, da Costa examined the role of the artist as a political actor engaged in technoscientific discourses, which is the topic of her 2008 book Tactical Biopolitics: Art, Activism, and Technoscience, co-edited with Kavita Philip. da Costa was a co-founder of Preemptive Media (2002–08), an arts, activism, and technology group, with Jamie Schulte and Brooke Singer, and a former collaborator of Critical Art Ensemble (2000–05), a collective of tactical media practitioners dedicated to exploring the intersections between art, technology, radical politics, and critical theory. In 1996, she began her incursion in arts and technology at L’École supérieure d’art d’Aix-en-Provence and continued her studies at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, with the arts and robotics program. In 2003, she became a founding member of the experimental and interdisciplinary graduate program Arts Computation Engineering (ACE) at University of California, Irvine. In 2007, da Costa enrolled in the History of Consciousness PhD program at University of California, Santa Cruz, where the feminist theorist Donna Haraway became her friend and mentor. da Costa presented her work in several places within the United States and around the world, such as Eyebeam in New York, Art Catalyst and the Museum of Natural History in London, and the Beall Center for Art + Technology in Irvine, CA, among many others. In 2006, she received an honorary mention for Pigeonblog from the Adobe emerging artist grant, and in 2007, an honorary mention from Prix Ars Electronica. In 2009, da Costa was awarded the Creative Capital grant for Emerging Fields to develop The Cost of Life series.
Public Programs
- Publication Launch: Saturday, October 5, 2024, 1–3 PM
- PigeonBlog Launch and Workshop at Crenshaw Dairy Mart: Saturday, October 19, 2:30-4 PM
- PigeonBlog Launch and Workshop: Saturday, November 16, 11 AM–1 PM
- Cooking and Gardening Workshop: Saturday, December 14, 2024 11 AM–2 PM
- GenTerra Performance: To be announced!
Research Programming
- A Preemptive Study: from public amateurism to community science, an ongoing study group
Deadline for sign up is March 6, 2022 - The life and artistic practice of Beatriz da Costa, a roundtable discussion with Robert F. Nideffer, Antoinette LaFarge, and others
March 27, 2022 1pm to 3pm - Oil Drilling in Los Angeles, a talk with Bhavna Shamasunder and Sandy Navarro from L.A. Grit Media
June 5, 2022 1pm to 3pm - A Preemptive Study: from tactical biopolitics to the cost of life, an ongoing study group
Deadline for sign up is August 14, 2022 - Part II of A Preemptive Study: from tactical biopolitics to the cost of life, a discussion with Kavita Philip
October 30, 2022 1-3pm - Artist Leslie Garcia performance and talk at Fulcrum Arts x LACE, in conversation with Curator Daniela Lieja Quintanar
March 19, 2023 , 1-3pm at the Cinelounge
Photo credit: Of Studio
Curatorial Team
Curator
Daniela Lieja Quintanar is Chief Curator and Director of Programming at REDCAT Gallery (former Chief Curator and Director of Programming at LACE Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions). She works between Los Angeles and Mexico, emphasizing contemporary art and curatorial practices that explore the politics and social issues of everyday life. In 2018, Lieja Quintanar was awarded the Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellowship. She was part of the curatorial team of MexiCali Biennial 2018-19. She served as Project Coordinator and Contributing Curatorial Advisor for Below the Underground: Renegade Art and Action in the 1990s Mexico at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, Getty PST:LA/LA initiative. In 2016, she worked with artist Teresa Margolles for her contribution La Sombra to the Public Art Biennial CURRENT: LA Water. She organized with LACE La Pista de Baile by Colectivo am, as part of the Getty/REDCAT PST: Live Art LA/LA Performance Festival. Lieja Quintanar curated Intergalactix: against isolation/contra el aislamiento (2021), Unraveling Collective Forms (2019); CAVERNOUS: Young Joon Kwak & Mutant Salon (2018) and Emory Douglas: Bold Visual Language (2018 co-curated with Essence Harden); home away from by Jimena Sarno (2017), El Teatro Campesino (1965-1975), (2017 co-curated with Samantha Gregg) at LACE. Lieja Quintanar holds a BA in Ciencias de la Cultura from the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana, Mexico City, and an MA in Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere from the University of Southern California.
Curatorial Assistant
Ana Briz is a researcher, writer, and curator in Los Angeles, the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Tongva peoples. In 2021, she joined the LACE team as curatorial assistant to (un)disciplinary tactics. Her research is situated in the field of performance, art, and visual culture in the United States with an emphasis on queer, feminist, and anti-racist work by BIPOC in California. She is broadly interested in issues of displacement, gentrification, mourning, and resistance in contemporary art and culture. The abolitionist imaginary informs her curatorial practice and research interests. Briz is currently a Ph.D. candidate in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and holds an M.A. in Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere from the University of Southern California and a B.A. in Art History from Florida International University.
Research Advisors
Artist Advisor
Robert F. Nideffer holds a Ph.D. in Sociology (1994) and an MFA in Computer Arts (1997), from the University of California, Santa Barbara. From 1998-2013 he was a Professor of Art at the University of California, Irvine, where he held a courtesy appointment in the Department of Informatics within the School of Information and Computer Science. He was made a tenured Associate Professor in 2002, and Full Professor in 2008. In 1999 he founded the Game Culture and Technology Lab, which went on to raise over $5,000,000 in sponsored research grants with a variety of academic, federal, and international partners. In 2005 he created an interdisciplinary undergraduate program in Game Culture and Technology. From 2005-2007 Nideffer was Co-Director, and from 2007-2009 Director, of the Art Computation Engineering (ACE) Graduate program, housed between the School of the Arts, the School of Information and Computer Science, and the School of Engineering. His work has been exhibited at a variety of national and international venues including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte in Spain; the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach, California; the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the 2002 Whitney Biennial. He has lectured extensively both inside and outside the academy, and his projects have been discussed in major media outlets including books, journal articles, television, the internet, film and radio. In 2013 he joined Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) where he served as Head of the Department of Arts until 2018.
Curatorial Advisor
Andrew McNeely is a writer, editor, curator, and a curatorial advisor to (un)disciplinary tactics. Andrew’s curating focuses on aesthetics, the philosophy of race, and spatial and environmental politics. His recent exhibition at LACE, A NonHuman Horizon (2019), investigates the articulation of racial identity in the work of three generations of environmentalist artists. He also curated Restless Debris (2016) at UCI’s UAG, which highlights the collective attachments to superfund sites often found in communities of color. Since 2018, Andrew has stewarded the Community Reading Group (CRG), a collective that is dedicated to verbalizing the limits of community and the duties of common life. CRG is organized by Olivia Leiter, Michael Berlin, Joy / Jade, Hailey Loman, and Zach Whitworth.
Curatorial Advisor
Christiane Paul has written extensively on new media arts, lectured internationally on art and technology and is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation’s 2016 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art. Her recent books are A Companion to Digital Art (Wiley Blackwell, 2016); Digital Art (Thames and Hudson, 3rd revised edition, 2015) Context Providers – Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts (Intellect, 2011; Chinese edition, 2012), co-edited with Margot Lovejoy and Victoria Vesna; and New Media in the White Cube and Beyond (UC Press, 2008). As Adjunct Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney Museum of American Art, she curated several exhibitions—including Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools (2011), Profiling (2007), Data Dynamics (2001) and the net art selection for the 2002 Whitney Biennial—and is responsible for artport, the Whitney Museum’s website devoted to Internet art. Other recent curatorial work includes Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art 1965 – 2018 (Whitney Museum, 2018-19), Little Sister (is watching you, too) (Pratt Manhattan Gallery, NYC, 2015); What Lies Beneath (Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul, 2015); The Public Private (Kellen Gallery, The New School, Feb. 7 – April 17, 2013), Eduardo Kac: Biotopes, Lagoglyphs and Transgenic Works (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2010); Biennale Quadrilaterale (Rijeka, Croatia, 2009-10); Feedforward – The Angel of History (co-curated with Steve Dietz; Laboral Center for Art and Industrial Creation, Gijon, Spain, Oct. 2009); and INDAF Digital Art Festival (Incheon, Korea, Aug. 2009). Dr. Paul has previously taught in the MFA computer arts department at the School of Visual Arts in New York (1999-2008); the Digital+Media Department of the Rhode Island School of Design (2005-08); the San Francisco Art Institute and the Center of New Media at the University of California at Berkeley (2008).
Research Advisor
Kavita Philip is a historian of science and culture, and the President’s Excellence Chair in Network Cultures and a Professor of English at the University of British Columbia (UBC) Department of English Language and Literatures. She is author of Civilizing Natures (Rutgers University Press), and co-editor of five volumes curating interdisciplinary work in radical history, political science, art, activism, gender, technology studies, and public policy. Previously Philip taught as Professor in History at the University of California, Irvine. She was also an affiliated Faculty in Informatics, and the Director and co-founder (with Du Bois scholar Dr. Nahum Chandler) of the research group in Science, Technology and Race. During her time at UC Irvine, she also served as the Director of the Critical Theory Institute, Director of the Graduate Feminist Emphasis, and Director of Graduate Studies in History. Philip holds a Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from Cornell, an M.A. in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology from Cornell, an M.S. in Physics from the University of Iowa, and a B.Sc. in Physics (with Chemistry and Mathematics minors) from Stella Maris College (University of Madras, India).
Artist Advisor
Brooke Singer engages technoscience as an artist, educator, nonspecialist and collaborator. Her work lives “on” and “off” line in the form of websites, workshops, photographs, maps, installations, public art and performances that often involves participation in pursuit of social change. She is Associate Professor of New Media at Purchase College, State University of New York, a former fellow at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center (2010-11), co-founder of the art, technology and activist group Preemptive Media (2002-2008) and co-founder of La Casita Verde (2013-). From 2018-2020 she was a research affiliate with the Groffman Research Group, Environmental Sciences Initiative, Advanced Scientific Research Center at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions such as MoMA/PS1, Warhol Museum of Art, The Banff Centre, Neuberger Museum of Art, Diverseworks and Matadero Madrid. She has been in residence at New York Hall of Science, Marble House Project, Headlands Center for the Arts, Helsinki International Artist Programme, among others. Her writing has been published in Big Data and Society, Radical History Review and Brooklyn Rail. She is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Microsoft and Melva Bucksbaum and Raymond Learsy.
Media Archaeologist/Media Advisor
Leslie García works developing electronic art and digital media projects. She explores the process of fusion between art and technology. Cofounder of the bioart collective Interspecifics (Mexico City) 2013-present, cofounder of the electronic media collective DreamAddictive (Tijuana B.C.) 2003-2010, and member of Astrovandalists in Mexico City 2011-2018. Associate researcher at the Nano Laboratory Nucleus of the Escola de Belas Artes (UFRJ) in Rio de Janeiro, 2012-2015. In 2015-2016, she worked as an artistic researcher in the media department of the Bauhaus University in Weimar Germany. Member of National System of Art Creators (SNCA) in the specialty of new technologies 2022-2025.
Research Advisor
Claire Pentecost is an artist and writer who researches the living matters of the unified multi-dimensional being that animates the critical zone of our planet. Her soil-erg project of 2012 considered the material of soil as the basis for an alternative econimic system. Pentecost’s work is driven by research and inspired by questions of form. She advocates for the role of the amateur in the production and interpretation of knowledge, while a longstanding interest in nature and artificiality predicates her recent responses to anthropogenic climate change. Pentecost has exhibited work nationally and internationally at dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany; 13th Istanbul Biennial; White Chapel, London; 3rd Mongolian Land Art Biennial; MCA Chicago; MSU Broad Museum; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Higher Pictures, New York; Corcoran Museum, Washington, DC; Milwaukee Art Museum; Transmediale 05, Berlin; and American Fine Arts, New York; and many others. Pentecost is currently a Professor of Photography at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Artist Advisor
Steve Kurtz PhD, Professor Emeritus of Art at the State University of New York, is a founding member of the internationally acclaimed art and theater group Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). Founded in 1987 by Steven Kurtz and Steve Barnes, CAE is an award-winning collective of artists of various specializations dedicated to exploring the intersections between art, technology, political activism, and critical theory. The collective has written 8 books, and its writings have been translated into 18 languages. CAE book projects include: The Electronic Disturbance (1994), Electronic Civil Disobedience & Other Unpopular Ideas (1996), Flesh Machine: Cyborgs, Designer Babies, & New Eugenic Consciousness (1998), Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media (2001), Molecular Invasion (2002), Marching Plague (2006), Disturbances (2012), and Aesthetics, Necropolitics, and Environmental Struggle (2018).
Research Collaborators
Antoinette LaFarge is an artist and writer whose visual work has taken form as computer-mediated performance, programmed installations, and digital prints. Recent art projects include Deep Earth (2021) and Burning Time (2018). Recent books include Sting in the Tale: Art, Hoax, and Provocation (DoppelHouse Press, 2021) and Louise Brigham and the Early History of Sustainable Furniture Design (Palgrave Macmillan 2019). Her writing and artwork have appeared in Art Journal, Wired, Leonardo, Ada, the Southern Quarterly, the MOSF Journal of Science Fiction, and elsewhere, as well as in anthologies from MIT Press, Oxford University Press, and other international presses. She is a longtime contributor to Wikipedia, where she focuses on closing gaps in the coverage of women and people of color. She is a professor of new media art at UC Irvine.
Bhavna Shamasunder is Associate Professor and Chair in the Urban and Environmental Policy Department and co-chair of the Public Health Program at Occidental College. She teaches and conducts research on environmental health and justice with a focus on the disparate and cumulative burdens faced by poor communities of color. Her active research projects include health impacts from neighborhood oil drilling in Los Angeles; the “environmental injustice of beauty” that considers health disparities for women of color from synthetic chemicals in consumer products; and the types of information (i.e. economic, public health, etc..) used by diverse immigrant communities in decisions to lighten skin and/or use skin lightening products. Her work has been supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the California Breast Cancer Research Program, and the National Science Foundation. She received her doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management.
Sandy Navarro is a lifelong resident of Historic South Central Los Angeles, whose firsthand experience of living in a disenfranchised community galvanized her commitment to social justice work. In 2014, Sandy joined the staff of Esperanza Community Housing, overseeing multiple community-led beautification projects and health-driven collaborations throughout South Los Angeles. While at Esperanza, Sandy managed the environmental justice campaign, People Not Pozos (People Not Oil Wells), served on the Stand Together Against Neighborhood Oil Drilling (STAND LA) coalition, and led local youth leaders in the formation of the South Central Youth Leadership Coalition. In 2017, Sandy launched, L.A. Grit Media, an agency dedicated to working collaboratively with organizations, researchers, and public health groups to produce community-driven media and advance community-based research. Sandy has produced educational videos, designed health literacy intervention materials, and created art exhibitions for Esperanza Community Housing, Occidental College, USC Environmental Health Centers, Iris Cantor-UCLA Women’s Health Center, and the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health. A graphic designer, videographer, and Community Health Promoter, Sandy Navarro utilizes her skills to bring visibility to the social issues in her community.
PRESS
- “Art and Science Intermix in Dozens of Exhibitions Across LA This Fall,” Hyperallergic
- “9 Shows to See During the Getty’s Science-Themed PST ART Festival,“ ARTnews
- “Arte y ciencia de América Latina se unen en el festival cultural más grande de Estados Unidos,” El Universal [ESP]
- “Art and science from Latin America come together in the largest cultural festival in the United States,” El Universal [ENG]
- “PST, el festival de cultura más grande de Estados Unidos busca que arte y ciencia colisionen,” El Universal [ESP]
- “PST, America’s largest cultural festival, seeks to bring art and science together,” El Universal [ENG]
- “Third Edition Of Getty’s PST ART Moves Beyond Los Angeles, And Beyond Art,” Forbes
- LACE featured in PST ART Climate Impact Program Press Release
- “Getty’s PST ART Goes Green,” The Art Newspaper
SUPPORT
Southern California’s landmark arts event, PST ART, returns in September 2024 with more than 70 exhibitions from museums and other institutions across the region, all exploring the intersections of art and science, both past and present. Dozens of cultural, scientific, and community organizations will join the latest edition, PST ART: Art & Science Collide, with exhibitions on subjects ranging from ancient cosmologies to Indigenous sci-fi, and from environmental justice to artificial intelligence. Art & Science Collide will share groundbreaking research, create indelible experiences for the public, and generate new ways of understanding our complex world. PST ART is presented by Getty. For more information about PST ART: Art & Science Collide, please visit pst.art.
Special thanks to the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural of Affairs for their support while LACE’s Hollywood Gallery is under renovation.
Beatriz da Costa: (un)disciplinary tactics, LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) participated in the PST ART Climate Impact Program, a groundbreaking integration of climate action, community building, and data reporting. Learn more at pst.art/climate.
