Marina Zurkow: Exploring Ecological Art Through Digital Media
In conversation with bitforms gallery, November 2024
In New York City’s Lower East Side, beneath a white plastic tent, artist Marina Zurkow and collaborator Sarah Rothberg conduct an unusual assessment. Participants don plastic robes as the duo evaluates the petrochemicals present in their clothing, phones, and accessories. This is “Immortal Plastics” (2012), a performance piece that exemplifies Zurkow’s approach to environmental art — one that acknowledges complexity and contradiction while seeking meaningful engagement with ecological issues.
In a wide-ranging conversation, Zurkow discusses her artistic practice, her relationship with scientific research, and how she uses technology to explore environmental themes.
Your work often involves scientific research. How do you approach these collaborations?
MZ: I would not characterize my work with scientists as full-blown collaborations. While I don’t list towards inaccuracy, speculation is not something scientists want to sign-off on. Most of the time I am reading. published research and conducting informal interviews in the field or remotely.
My ‘job’ and my freedom as an artist is to connect-the-dots: to find unlikely systemic and personal intersections, and to synthesize new stories or scenarios out of research, observation, and speculation. I love to find reasons to speak with biologists, ecologists, ranchers, animal behaviorists, cultural theorists, anthropologists, poets, and others.
Can you give an example of how this research process works in practice?
MZ: Between 2016 and 2019, I worked with jellyfish as a foodstuff in collaboration with LA-based chefs Hank and Bean. Jellyfish are considered indicator species — and what they can indicate is often a decline in ocean health. The interactions we had with scientists — a marine biologist who raises moon jellies for aquaria, scientists who study jellyfish locomotion and morphology — were invaluable in untangling the wicked mess I was interested in. By describing jellies’ mysterious beginning as polyps, discussing how some species arrive in ship’s ballast and then can take over foreign ecosystems, and refusing to correlate absolutely their overall presence to climate changes, their willingness to converse with me contributed to the stories I could weave, and held me accountable, not hyperbolic.
How do you approach environmental art while acknowledging your own impact?
MZ: Artists involved with ‘environmental’ topics and issues are often asked to explain their decisions — both content and material — in rational, justifiable terms, or to act as models or proxies for good behavior. Most of my media works use electricity to power them, solvent based inks to print them, massive logistics systems to transport components of them across oceans. From the perspective of purity, the works’ conceptual and ethical values are of course compromised because I am enmeshed in complex, dirty systems. But I want reach; and without digital reproduction, my reach will be intimate.
Your work often involves speculation and storytelling. How do these elements function in your practice?
MZ: I used to say that I was interested in telling the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. But that has changed in the last 10 years. I like creating scenarios that blend the real, the researched, and the speculative. Questions that ask, ‘What If?’
Myths can create a metaphoric theater in which to observe that schematic in action without getting dragged into the politics of the present in any specific way. So, at a distance, one can perceive entangled nature-cultures at work and play.
Your recent work in collaboration with James Schmitz, “The Breath Eaters” (2022) uses real-time data visualization. How did that affect your storytelling approach?
MZ: I found using such serious real-time data quite restrictive… On the other hand, it was challenging to work through HOW data visualization tells a story. There isn’t a singular truth to be revealed, of course: there are points of view embedded in every decision one makes — to cluster info, to mess with scale, to depict violently, to exclude or occlude information.
After posting an excerpt of the work on Instagram, scores of angry people pointed fingers at nations other than their own. I hoped to inspire viewers to think about the fundamental problem with national boundaries when it comes to pollutants or climate change, and to consider that most earth forces are transnational.
How has your use of generative tools and AI evolved?
MZ: When I made The Crucible series photo collages, several people asked if they were AI — so it seems that my aesthetic is predisposed towards AI as a tool/helper/database, considering my hybrid analogue/digital practice of bricolage and collage. One of the components of my practice that has been evolving since 2009 is the element of surprise — I want to be surprised. Generative work produces accidental hybrids, overlaps, synergies.
Using generative tools like Stable Diffusion have made it easier to visualize the unmakeable. Being able to train LoRAs and output iterative works has made it possible to have a unique personal database and a variety of assets for animation that I would struggle to find in the ‘real world’.
What’s the ultimate goal of your work?
MZ: I make images that can’t easily be described in words. They desire to concatenate meaning, create some brain-busting synthesis that pushes you towards what currently cannot be expressed in linear word models. If they were, I would make text works.
Through her practice, Zurkow continues to explore and reimagine the “wicked messes” that characterize our relationship with the environment. Her work prompts audiences to consider actionable questions: “What would we want to ‘bring back’ to this world, now or in the future? And, how do we make that happen?”
Marina Zurkow (b. 1962, Lives and works in New York) is a media artist focused on near-impossible nature and culture intersections. She uses life science, materials, and technologies — including food, software, animation, clay and other biomaterials — to foster intimate connections between people and non-human agents.
