In this final episode of season 2, we talk with dancer and dance scholar Mariama Diagne about the art of “heavy hovering”—the ability of modern ballet and dance to teach us a different way of moving and being on Earth. We discuss efforts to relocate human life to other planets to escape the effects of climate change, the beauty of meeting the challenges of terrestrial gravity, the environmental legacy of Pina Bausch’s dance theater, and the transformative qualities of West-African dance pract...

Special Edition 3 | Connecting the Dots

Art of Interference explores creative responses to climate change. We feature artists whose images, sounds, and performances encourage us to retune the relations of nature and technology, the human and the nonhuman. We ask climate scientists about their research and how it chimes with the interventions of contemporary artists. Additionally, we speak to activists, cultural critics, and policymakers about the need to develop a new ethics appropriate to our twenty-first century of planetary crises. In each episode, we discuss timely and untimely perspectives on how we, amid our human-made emergencies, may act in the world and allow this changing world to act on us.Our third season investigates different Earth materials--metals, minerals, rocks, soil, moss, or wood. How, we ask our guests, does organic and inorganic matter in all its elemental states and shapes inspire their artistic creativity? And in what way does their work challenge prevalent notions of agency and entanglement, care and co-dependency, control and disturbance? By pursuing these questions, we present contemporary art as a unique laboratory to reevaluate common notions of interference and what it means to be alive amid the ecological crises of our present.Our first two seasons featured artists whose work collaborated with water and air, or fourth and final season will discuss artistic practices that use fire as a medium to address the challenges of our over-heating planet. In our AoI Special Editions, we present thought-provoking conversations about the arts as transformative media of inquiry, the role of art within the landscapes of higher education, and the interplay between artistic research, climate studies, and technology development.Art of Interference is produced at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN. It has been made possible with the financial support of “The Science Communication Media Collaborative “ of the College of Arts &amp; Science.For more information, visit us at https://artofinterference.com.