Heather Davies: Plastic Aesthetics

This talk will address the question of transdisciplinary research between art, science, and the humanities through the work of the Synthetic Collective. Synthetic Collective works together to sample, map, understand, and visualize the complexities of plastics and micro-plastics pollution in the Great Lakes Region. Crucial to this research methodology is the driving principle that artists and scientists conduct research together, from the outset of the inquiry.

Additionally, Heather Davis will also present some questions drawing from the ongoing collaboration with a person who works in a plastic cup factory, and Heather Davis‘ theorization of plastic, to think through what these collective practices might effect, and how knowledge is made differently when it is produced together. 

Heather Davis

is an assistant professor of Culture and Media at the New School. She is the co-editor of Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments, and Epistemologies and editor of the award-winning collection Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada. Her most recent book, Plastic Matter (Duke UP, 2022), re-examines materiality in light of plastic’s saturation. Davis is a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes.

Monika Halkort

is assistant professor and head of the Art x Science School for Transformation at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Her research and teaching focus on the political ecology of transformation processes, emphasising, in particular, the role of bio/geo-chemical substances and materials in mediating historical (in)justice and change.