Nancy Baker Cahill is a transdisciplinary artist whose work examines complex systems, with
an emphasis on the relationship between consciousness, intelligence, and embodiment. Systems thinking is integral to her poetics;
her concerns focus on power and its biopolitical impacts, particularly ecological and social harms.
In this talk, Nancy Baker Cahill, who is currently a fellow at the the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures (University
of Applied Arts Vienna), will discuss projects in her research-based practice that address creative co-building: what has
worked, failed, and remains unknown. The talk will address human perception, ecological imagination, sensory expansion, and
the work of sense-making through overlapping existential crises.
Using
a blend of analog and digital media, Baker Cahill creates immersive experiences, video installations, sculptures, and conceptual
projects that engage the human sensorium and are rooted in drawing. Since 2018, she has been the Founder and Artistic Director
of 4th Wall, a free, AR public art platform exploring resistance and inclusive (often participatory) creative expression,
which she considers to be a form of social sculpture. Her monumental AR artworks build on the lineage of ecofeminist land
art, often highlighting interdependence and the more-than-human. She takes a critical approach to all of the emerging technologies
she uses, subverting convention to offer alternative imaginaries.
Baker
Cahill has received the 2026 USA Fellowship Award, the 2025 Full Dome Festival's Janus Award for Best Feature Film, the 2024
Infinity Festival's Monolith Award for New Media Fine Art, the 2022 LACMA Art +Tech Grant, a 2022 C.O.L.A. Master Artist Fellowship,
and the 2021 Williams College Bicentennial Medal of Honor. She is a former Berggruen Institute Artist Fellow, is an Affiliate
at the Harvard metaLAB, and a TEDx speaker. In 2026, she will be an Artist Fellow at the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures
in Vienna.Solo museum presentations include LACMA, The Hammer Museum, The Whitney
Museum, The Georgia Museum of Art, and an upcoming solo exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Art. Her work is held in
the collections of LACMA, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Georgia Museum of Art, The Museum of Art and History; RFC
Art Collection, The Smart Museum of Art, The Winthrop University Collection, The Lyman Allyn Art Museum, and 0x Collection
in Basel, Switzerland.
She has been profiled in many publications,
including The Art Newspaper, Frieze, and The New York Times. Her essays appear in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Nam June
Paik Art Center Reader and October Magazine.
Research interests are
Digital bioacoustics, the physics of light and perception, biomimicry, systemic power and networked resistance.
Website by Nancy Baker Cahill
About
the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures:
The Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures
is a space for intervention, investigation, and experimentation within the expansive disciplines of arts, science, and technologies.
Based at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, the institute critically engages digital and algorithmic cultures. Building
on the rich heritage of Viennese investigations into cybernetics, net cultures, media art, and tactical media, the institute
serves as a vital node within a global network of research institutions on digital cultures.
The Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures strives to challenge the underlying logics of digital cultures, unraveling
the intricacies of cybernetic control systems and machine learning processes, the dynamics of online communities, the vast
landscape of media-technological infrastructures, and their continued entanglements. This endeavor is guided by a commitment
to remaking research itself, taking into account reflexive methodologies and seeking collective expressions. Taking on social
and ecological responsibility in the face of emerging data systems, the institute questions the extractivist origins of digital
landscapes and explores potential technological approaches beyond today’s data positivism. The Weibel Institute for Digital
Cultures invites researchers, students, artists, and activists to join a space for reflection, discussion, and collaboration.
Offering access to resources such as the Peter Weibel Archive and an extensive library, the institute fosters theoretical
and artistic explorations that probe deeper into the cultures that make up our digital spaces. This public program includes
lectures, symposia, exhibitions, workshops, and other activities.
