“Sparking Stewardship”

Following a decade and a half of establishing their international artistic and musical solo careers, Marlena Novak and Jay Alan Yim founded localStyle in 2000 as a platform for collaboration, addressing issues of climate change and extractivism and expanding to focus on non-human others via themes such as the mating behavior of non-binary marine flatworms, the sonification of electric fish, speculative blackbird grammar, the illusory logic underlying human taxonomic systems, and the crisis facing coral reefs, whom they consider the voice of the Anthropocene. Their intermedia works-a practice that includes experimental 3D animation, 3D printing, processed video, digital sound, interactive installations, live performance with electronics, audience participation, and site-specific sculpture-have been presented in museums, galleries, alternative venues, and festivals in more than fifty cities worldwide from Abu Dhabi to Warsaw. Collectively they have received grants, awards, and commissions from the Arts Council of Great Britain, National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation, Kennedy Center, New York State Council on the Arts, DCASE, and others. This talk is free and open to the public.