Natalie Jeremijenko

Artist, xDesign Environmental Health Clinic and Lab

No One Trusts an Artist

by Maureen Tuthill

To test the limits of her civil rights to mobility, Natalie Jeremijenko wore roller blades through Los Angeles International Airport and posted the video of her experience on the web. To identify the myriad contaminants in New York Harbor, she built a boat out of empty 2-liter soda bottles and floated out onto the water with a laptop to collect samplings and record the results. To understand the environmental pressures placed on sugar maples in New England, she hung six of them upside-down 30-feet in the air outside the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. 

“You can see their character when they’re put in a challenging situation,” Jeremijenko says of the sugar maples. “Just like all of us.”
 
She’s been called a mad scientist and the label might not be too far off the mark. Jeremijenko thinks in a dozen directions simultaneously, answering a single question with a series of seemingly disconnected tangents. Invariably, though, she returns to the precise point she was all along. And it’s usually a good one.
 
Through an outrageous fusion of art, biochemistry, physics, neuroscience and precision engineering, Jeremijenko jostles expectations and raises hopes about the positive potential of technology.  Her entire body of work emanates from one core belief: she thinks we can do better. But she has no intention of being prickly about it. 
 
“I do think that taking play very seriously is an important strategy,” she says. “I come out of a very critical tradition, and that’s no fun to say.”
 
Jeremijenko brings all her creative and intellectual forces to bear on proving that an increasingly technological world does not have to result in environmental and social catastrophes.
 
“We are not passive victims—we get the technology we deserve,” she says. “Technology is an opportunity for social change. The question is, what is that opportunity?”
 
Like many of today’s prophetic innovators, Jeremijenko resists the path laid down by Enlightenment thinkers who believed that reason, methodology, and most importantly, information would solve the problems of humanity. “The Enlightenment view was that information leads to action, when in fact, it doesn’t,” she says. “Everyone’s heard of global warming, but no one’s really abandoning their cars.”
 
For her part, Jeremijenko is not abandoning hope. She sees technology as something that we must harness deliberately and intelligently.
 
Her role as an artist, she says, is to stand in for the “non-expert,” or the “everyman.” She uses her artistic sensibilities to rethink some of the technological and environmental quandaries in which we have found ourselves. 
 
“No one believes an artist—no one trusts an artist,” says Jeremijenko. “Scientists say that CO2 levels are up and it’s believable just because they’re scientists. No one’s going to believe me because of my credentials as an artist. The only way artists are persuasive is through their representation.”
 
As the director of xDesign Environmental Health Clinic and Lab in the Art department at New York University, Jeremijenko prescribes remedial solutions for environmental problems. xDesign solutions always involve public participation—for example, the communal planting of sunflowers to absorb toxic substances in the soil or the setting up of round-the clock photography to detect radioactive substances at a landfill (the radioactive substances, in this case, turned out to be seagulls). 
 
While scientists are accountable to their communities of experts, neighborhoods are accountable to themselves. Under Jeremijenko’s prescriptions, information is collected by people in the community and posted for public perusal. And if everyone has something different to say about the matter, even better.
 
“It’s in the difference of opinion that people have where you can really learn things,” she says. “I don’t think that scientists want or need to have a monopoly on experiments or figuring out what’s going to work. It’s something we all have to do.”

Getting people involved in the production of data and the designing of solutions is the goal, according to Jeremijenko.
 
“If you’ve collected data yourself, then you’ve got a much more robust and viable opinion of what the problem is,” she says. “Having your own evidence is really where we have power.”
 
Jerimijenko calls this the “open information realm,” where multi-parameter problems are solved by “throwing a lot of people at them.” It’s an unpredictable, and for some, uncomfortable space where anything might happen. 
 
For a woman who roller blades through LAX, it’s the only place to be.
 
 www.environmentalhealthclinic.net/