The Ambasz Forums convene thinkers from a wide variety of disciplines—from architecture and art history to biology and computer science—for public conversations on a given facet of the relationship between design, the built environment, and the natural world. Each Ambasz Forum aims to not only bring new information and viewpoints to the public, but to catalyze conversation and debate on design’s political and ecological impacts.
Wet Urbanisms
Watch the video on YouTube
Friday, January 17, 2025, The Celeste Bartos Theater, Museum of Modern Art, New York
Inspired by the publication of André Tavares’s book Architecture Follows Fish: An Amphibious History of the North Atlantic, the Wet Urbanisms panel discussion brought Tavares into a conversation with a group of thinkers—interdisciplinary artist Susan Blight, architects Tei Carpenter and Jesse LeCavalier, environmental historian Connie Y. Chiang, digital artist and digital media scholar Nettrice Gaskins, artist Daniel Keller, architectural historian Anna Renken, art historian James Merle Thomas, and architect and researcher Zhi Ray Wang—whose work examines architectural designs and environmental stewardship practices that bridge the marine-terrestrial border.
Wet Urbanisms continues a line of research that the Ambasz Institute began with its exhibition Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism, which featured projects by Ant Farm, Carolyn Dry, and Wolf Hilbertz that proposed constructing human and interspecies habitats in aquatic environments. In their marine imaginings, these designers ventured into territory underexplored by the field at large; while over 70 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, scant attention has been paid to the relationship between architecture and its watery surrounds. Panelists shone a light on the many ways—whether it be through neoliberal seasteading fantasies, underwater afrofuturist mythologies, public aquariums, or extractive fishing industries—that architects and others have imagined the relationship between our terrestrial lives and the waters that surround us.
Participants
André Tavares is an architect and founding director of Dafne Editora, an independent publishing house based in Porto. He was editor-in-chief of the magazine Jornal Arquitectos (2013–15) and, with Diogo Seixas Lopes, he was chief co-curator of the 2016 Lisbon Architecture Triennale, The Form of Form. He is the author of The Anatomy of the Architectural Book, L’Étoile Filante Charles Siclis, Álvaro Siza Raw Material, Vitruvius Without Text, and the recently published Architecture Follows Fish: An Amphibious History of the North Atlantic. Currently he is a researcher at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto, where he is the principal investigator of the project Fishing Architecture, funded through a European Research Council consolidator grant.
Susan Blight (Anishinaabe, Couchiching First Nation) is an interdisciplinary artist working with public art, site-specific intervention, photography, film, and social practice. Her solo and collaborative work engages questions of personal and cultural identity and its relationship to space. Blight is cofounder of Ogimaa Mikana, an artist collective working to reclaim and rename the roads and landmarks of Anishinaabeg territory with Anishinaabemowin, and is a member of the Indigenous Routes artist collective, which works to provide free new-media training for Indigenous youth. She is currently a PhD candidate in social justice education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (UofT), is chair in Indigenous visual culture at OCAD University and an assistant professor in the Faculty of Arts and Science and. Most recently, she joined the Capilano Review as associate editor of the publication’s Indigenous Places and Names series.
Tei Carpenter is founder and director of Agency—Agency, an award-winning architectural design studio that pursues a better world through the transformative potentials of design. Trained in philosophy and architecture, she earned a bachelor’s degree from Brown University, where she was a Royce Fellow, and her MArch degree at Princeton University, where she was awarded the Howard Crosby Butler Traveling Fellowship in architecture. Carpenter has lectured internationally and, alongside her practice, has taught at a number of institutions, including Brown University, Columbia University GSAPP, the University of Toronto, and Yale University, where she is currently a critic at the Yale School of Architecture. Born and raised in New York City, Carpenter serves on the board of directors at the Storefront for Art and Architecture.
Connie Y. Chiang studies modern United States history, with specialties in environmental history, the history of the American West, social history, and Asian American history. She is particularly interested in how shifting human interactions with and attitudes toward the natural world have transformed American society. She is the author of Shaping the Shoreline: Fisheries and Tourism on the Monterey Coast and has published articles in many journals, including the Journal of American History and Environmental History. Her latest book, Nature Behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of the Japanese American Incarceration, explores how the environment shaped the confinement of over 110,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II.
Dr. Nettrice R. Gaskins is an African American digital artist, academic, cultural critic, and advocate of STEAM fields. In her work she explores “techno-vernacular creativity” and Afrofuturism. Dr. Gaskins teaches, writes, “fabs,” and makes art using algorithms and machine learning. She has taught multimedia, visual art, and computer science with high school students. Currently, Dr. Gaskins is the assistant director of the Lesley STEAM Learning Lab at Lesley University. She is an advisory board member for the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. Her first full-length book, Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation, is currently available, and her AI-generated artworks can be viewed in journals, magazines, museums, and on the Web.
Daniel Keller is an American artist, writer, and filmmaker whose wide-ranging output engages with issues at the intersection of politics, economics, technology, culture, and collaboration. He is a contributor to New Models, Texte Zur Kunst, DIS, and Spike Art. His work has been exhibited at the New Museum, NYC; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw; Fridericianum, Kassel; the Athens Biennale; KW, Berlin; and the Zabludowicz Collection, London. In 2018, Keller cofounded the podcast and website newmodels.io with arts journalist Caroline Busta and film director and audio producer Lil Internet.
Jesse LeCavalier uses the tools of urban design and architecture to research, theorize, and speculate about infrastructure and logistics. He is the author of The Rule of Logistics: Walmart and the Architecture of Fulfillment, and his design work has been recognized by the Sudbury 2050 urban design competition, the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program, the Oslo Triennale, and the Seoul Biennale. His work has appeared in Cabinet, Public Culture, Places, Art Papers, Thresholds, and Harvard Design Magazine. LeCavalier is associate professor of architecture at the Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, where he directs the NYC-based master of science in advanced urban design (MSAUD) program.
Anna Renken is a PhD candidate in architecture, landscape, and design at the Daniels Faculty, with a collaborative specialization in environmental studies. Her research explores concepts of nature and approaches to the environment in the design fields since the mid-20th century. In particular, she is interested in tracking how designers have engaged with science and technology through their use of material and representational techniques. She has worked on curatorial and editorial projects at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Walker Art Center, and Log, and her writing has been included in associated publications as well as Drawing Matter, Places, and Pidgin.
James Merle Thomas is a scholar, curator, and executive currently serving as the inaugural deputy director at the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. Prior to joining the Frankenthaler Foundation, Thomas served as the executive director of the Resnick Center for Herbert Bayer Studies at the Aspen Institute, and as assistant professor of art history at Temple University. Thomas served as part of the core curatorial and editorial team responsible for the 2nd Seville Biennial (2006), the 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008), and the Third Paris Triennale (2012). His creative projects encompass large-scale exhibitions and creative projects, academic anthologies, and scholarly and general writing about art, technology, and media of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Zhi Ray Wang is a researcher, architect, and teaching assistant based at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). With a background in architecture and a focus on human-centred research, Ray explores the intersections of urbanism, technology, and sustainability. He is a dual-master candidate for the master of science in architecture studies (SMArchS) in urbanism and electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) at MIT. Before joining MIT, he was a registered architect and interior designer from Taiwan. He is a founder of WZR, a multidisciplinary practice based in Boston and Taipei that believes architecture to be a mixed form of cultural operation and advanced technology. WZR works at a variety of scales and contexts, ranging from art to architecture and urbanism.
Moderated by Carson Chan and Matthew Wagstaffe, Ambasz Institute
The Aquatic Brain
Sunday, June 16, 2024, The Celeste Bartos Theater, Museum of Modern Art, New York
Organized in conjunction with the exhibition Joan Jonas: Good Night Good Morning, the panel discussion The Aquatic Brain brought Joan Jonas into conversation with a group of thinkers—artist and researcher Joshua Citarella, historian of science Samantha Muka, media theorist John Shiga, and marine biologist and frequent Jonas collaborator David Gruber—whose work considers the promise and limits of multispecies cohabitation, the relationship between ecology and the built environment, and the intelligence of nonhuman animal life.
The wondrous agency of the natural world has been a concern throughout Joan Jonas’s 50-year career. “From the very beginning, nature has been a context for my work,” Jonas recalls. “I have had a close relationship to the outdoors from early childhood.” More recently, Jonas has returned to environmental concerns, from projects that explore the vulnerability of endangered species and ecosystems to Jonas’s Moving Off the Land II, a large-scale major installation focused on the sentience of nonhuman marine lifeforms. With this work, Jonas inaugurated a sustained engagement with David Gruber, a marine biologist renowned for his use of AI technology to translate the communication of sperm whales, and for his research developing cameras that approximate the perception of marine mammals. Landmark ocean footage by Gruber, including the never-before-captured birth of a sperm whale, appears in two of Jonas’s works in the exhibition, the aforementioned Moving Off the Land II, and Jonas’s most recent work, To Touch Sound, commissioned by MoMA for the exhibition.
Participants
Joan Jonas began her decades-long career in New York’s vibrant Downtown art scene of the 1960s and ’70s, where she was one of the first artists to work in performance and video. Drawing influence from literature, Noh and Kabuki theater, and art history, her early experimental works probed how a given element—be it distance, mirrors, the camera, or even wind—could transform one’s perception. Jonas continues to produce her most urgent work through immersive multimedia installations that address climate change and kinship between species. “Despite my interest in history,” she has said, “my work always takes place in the present.”
Joshua Citarella is an artist and Internet culture researcher based in New York City. He is the founder of Do Not Research. He has taught at the School of Visual Arts and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and has served as an outside advisor at Carnegie Mellon University and Tufts University. His work is included in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum, Netherlands, and the Hood Museum of Art. His publications are included in the libraries of the School of Visual Art, Yale University, Harvard University, RISD, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, among others.
David Gruber is the founder and president of Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), a nonprofit, interdisciplinary scientific and conservation initiative on a mission to listen to and translate the communication of sperm whales. He is a distinguished professor of biology and environmental ccience at the City University of New York, Baruch College, and the CUNY Graduate Center. His interdisciplinary research bridges animal communication, climate science, marine biology, microbiology, and molecular biology, and his inventions include technology to perceive the underwater world (“shark-eye camera”) from the perspective of marine animals.
John Shiga is a professor in the School of Professional Communication at Toronto Metropolitan University, where he teaches urban media, cross-cultural communication, knowledge translation, science communication, and communication for social change. His current research and creative practice focuses on the politics of underwater sound. Through archival research and audiovisual installations, he explores the intertwined histories of ocean science, nuclear imperialism, and environmental sensing infrastructures. He has published work on the history of digital audio, intellectual property, media theory, and interspecies communication.
Samantha Muka is an assistant professor in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at the Stevens Institute of Technology. Her research looks at the history of marine science, with special emphasis on the history of technological development and deployment to study and shape the marine environment. Her first book, Oceans under Glass, looks at how a large network of aquarium users have developed and shared craft knowledge about how to maintain marine organisms in captivity. Her current project examines the history of ocean waste management to see how engineering and management have evolved along with public perceptions of the marine environment.
Moderated by Carson Chan and Matthew Wagstaffe, Ambasz Institute
Accessibility
Automated captioning is available for all online programs. American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation and live captioning is available for public programs upon request with two weeks’ advance notice. MoMA will make every effort to provide accommodation for requests made with less than two weeks’ notice. For accessibility questions or accommodation requests please email [email protected] or call (212) 708-9781.
These events were made possible through a generous gift from Emilio Ambasz. The Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and the Natural Environment is a platform for fostering dialogue, promoting conversation, and facilitating research about the relationship between the built and natural environment, with the aim of making the interaction between architecture and ecology visible and accessible to the wider public while highlighting the urgent need for an ecological recalibration.