Tania Bruguera and Rebecca Uchill

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Scholar Rebecca Uchill with artist and current Radcliffe Fellow Tania Bruguera lead a workshop to critically engage notions of place, politics and “site-specificity” as part of the Mahindra Humanities Center conference Technical Landscapes: Aesthetics and the Environment in the History of Science and Art.

The conference will address what Peter Galison calls “technical lands” and examine sites where global knowledge practices and aesthetic categories have converged to literally transform the physical geography of the land. Conventional terms like “nature,” “culture,” “value,” “capital,” “territory,” and “site” no longer exist as clearly delineated categories (indeed if they ever did). Technical landscapes constitute the meeting points of contested relations between history, knowledge, material practices, and environmental change.

The conference will include keynote addresses by Peter Galison, Harvard History of Science, with Caroline Jones, MIT History of Art and Architecture, and Rebecca Uchill, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology. It will also feature a series of thematically linked events including a GPS-based interactive “sound walk” at the Harvard Arnold Arboretum by Teri Rueb (multi-media artist and professor, Department of Media Study, SUNY Buffalo), an evening reception and sound performance at the Waterworks Museum.  

Organized in affiliation with Mahindra Humanities Center’s interdisciplinary graduate student conference, Technical Landscapes: Aesthetics and the Environment in the History of Science and Art. Hosted by the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Tania Bruguera is Elizabeth S. and Richard M. Cashin Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. Rebecca Uchill is Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Art, Science & Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.