Our guest for this week is a follow on to our guest from last week. Dr. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is an artist based in the UK who has a piece in the “More Than Human” exhibition at the Design Museum that our guest last week Justin McGuirk curated. That exhibition opens July 11, but if you’re watching this episode on YouTube or Spotify, you’ll get a sneak peek of her piece in this episode.
Daisy’s art is multidisciplinary and examines our fraught human relationships with nature and technology. In addition to her work in the upcoming Design Museum exhibition, her Pollinator Pathmaker piece, which uses an algorithm to design art in the form of what we think of as gardens but for the benefit of pollinators rather than huamans, has been created for the Serpentine at Kensington Gardens and The Natural History Museum in Berlin. Other work of Daisy’s has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Natural History Museum in London, the Cooper Hewitt in New York and the Science Gallery in Dublin among many other prestigious institutions around the world. She's also received several awards including the Changemaker Award from Dezeen and The Rapoport Award for Women in Art & Technology from The Lumen Prize.
In this episode, we talk about the overarching themes of Daisy's work, her obsession with exploring how we think about the idea of better, her Pollinator Pathmaker project and a couple of her other projects including one in which she created a digital version of an severely endangered rhino and resurrected the smell of a lost flower. We also talk a bit about non-human animal consciousness and the potential for creativity and making art, at least from the perspective of how we understand those terms.
Links
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg website
Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg Instagram