Remina Greenfield

Website: https://reminagreenfield.com/

Bio: Remina Greenfield is Director of Research at Anicka Yi Studio, where she leads research for projects ranging from kelp sculptures to autonomous floating machines to paintings made through machine learning. She has contributed to exhibitions such as ÄLñ§ñ at Gladstone Gallery, Metaspore at Pirelli HangarBicocca, In Love With The World at Tate Modern, and Yi’s works for the 58th Venice Biennale. Remina holds an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design where she has taught in the graduate and undergraduate departments. She has written for The New Inquiry, Technoetic Arts Journal, Heichi Magazine, and Biodesigned, among others.

Statement: If metabolism is a positive set of life-sustaining chemical reactions, the conversion of material into energy and energy into material, what might be its shadow consequences? Decompose Institute (artist duo composed of Remina Greenfield and Shuyi Cao) renders the constructive and destructive aspects of metabolism visible in sculpture, video projection, and holograms that negotiate aesthetics and critique the anthropogenic era while acknowledging that beyond the tangible object, art exists in a network of living relations. The work of Decompose Institute features organic, chemical, and algorithmically simulated microbial life as active agents in systems of fermentation and decay. On the microbial scale, fermentation and decay are the same process; both involve populations of microbes growing and metabolizing. From the human perspective, fermentation generates something greater than the constituent parts, as when honey and water become mead, while decay unmakes a thing so that the elements are less than the whole. Fermentation creates; decay, a shadow of metabolism at the microbial scale, dismantles.