Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life
Elizabeth Ellsworth is an artist and Professor of Media Studies, The New School for Public Engagement, New York City. Jamie Kruse is an artist, designer, and independent scholar working in Brooklyn, New York. Ellsworth and Kruse are co-directors of smudge studio, an art collaborative founded in 2005. smudge works across graphic and web design, data and field research, public pedagogy and communication (including blogging), and aesthetic response. They use media to visualize or “signal” invisible forces (earth forces as well human forces) that shape natural and built environments with great consequence, but about which there is little cultural awareness. smudge’s current projects invent ways to think and act at junctures of public media design and use, the social production of knowledge, and disruptive change. They translate abstract and complex ideas, situations, and data into images, objects, experiences and environments that support experimental thinking. Within smudge’s hybrid practice, they are concerned with how to invent aesthetic provocations that assist humans in feeling for themselves the reality of contemporary forces and scales of change (natural and human-made).