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Join Hixon-Riggs Early Career Fellow Isabel Beavers for the talk "Meet Me in a Pleasant Place: Worldbuilding, Climate Crisis, and Queer Ecology." Beavers will speak about their transdisciplinary artistic and research practices. Part process, part story, part lecture this talk will delve into their multidisciplinary research and the many facets of worldbuilding for their upcoming project Meet Me In a Pleasant Place.

Beavers’ has a hybrid practice as an artist, artistic director of SUPERCOLLIDER, and instructor. They focus on alternative modes of knowing that challenge epistemological hierarchies and open space for telling new stories and imagining new eco-futures. As a media artist, Beavers is interested in technology as a material space for expressing immateriality and in transcending thresholds between the virtual and the physical to explore the murky liminal spaces where intimacy, resistance, and revolution reside. Their recent projects have explored mythology and climate change in Iceland, the eco-social intersections of mega-fires in California, water futures in Jordan, the juxtaposition of deep time and techno-urgency in deep-sea mining for polymetallic nodules. During the fellowship they will be developing a new project, Meet Me in a Pleasant Place.

"Meet me in a pleasant place" is a speculative, digital world-building project that examines the extractive industry of copper mining. As an electrically conductive metal, copper is in high demand for technological devices like solar cells, EV batteries, computer + phone batteries and more. We are now mining copper from the farthest reaches on Earth — the deep ocean – at a great detriment to marine ecosystems. The geological record shows that until the first Industrial Revolution, the copper mining activity of Ancient Rome was one of the most polluting events to ever occur on Earth. This world building project weaves stories across time, connecting the fall of the Roman Empire, imminent environmental collapse, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and the queer and cultural site of the bathhouse through the material of copper. How can envisioning alternate worlds make way for generating new ones?

Biography

Isabel Beavers (they/she) is a transdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Their work explores mutable ontologies that emerge from queerness, more-than-humans, and technology. Beavers’ work has been presented, exhibited, and screened nationally and internationally, including at Oceanside Museum of Art for Getty’s PST Art + Science Collid (2024), Blue Hour at AltaSea (2023), Helsinki Design Week (2022), Last Frontier NYC (2022), Real Artilleria de Sevilla, Spain (2022), Heidi Duckler Dance (2022), Museum of Design Atlanta (2021), CultureHub (2020), MIT Museum (2019), Humbolt-Universität zu Berlin Thaer-Institut (2018), Mountain Time Arts (2017) among others. They have held workshops at the Hammer Museum (2020) and the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (2019). They hold an MFA from the SMFA at Tufts University and a BS from the University of Vermont. They were the 2021 AICAD/NOAA Fisheries Art + Science Fellow, 2022 Creative Impact Lab Amman Lead Artist with ZERO1, and are the Artistic Director of SUPERCOLLIDER LA. They are the Hixon-Riggs Early Career Fellow in STS at Harvey Mudd College.