BRUNO LATOUR
Bruno Latour is a philosopher, anthropologist, and sociologist of science and technology. Best known as a founder of actor-network theory, he is currently one of the most cited humanists and social scientists in the world. He has written and edited more than twenty books including Laboratory Life (with Steve Woolgar, 1979), Science in Action (1987), The Pasteurization of France (1988), We Have Never Been Modern (1991), Politics of Nature (1994), Pandora's Hope (1999), Reassembling the Social (2005), An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2013), and Facing Gaia (2015). He is emeritus professor at Sciences Po Paris, where he directed the Sciences Po Medialab. Member of several academies and recipient of six honorary doctorates, he is the recipient in 2013 of the Holberg Prize, and is currently an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. His participation in Feverish World is supported by the Dan and Carole Burack Lectureship Fund.
TORKWASE DYSON
Torkwase Dyson is a painter, sculptor, and installation artist who uses distilled geometric abstraction to create an idiosyncratic language that is both diagrammatic and expressive. Her work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, and Harlem's Studio Museum. Her video installation The Color of Crude explores the eco-crisis in relation to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade through clandestine underwater journeys between the Gulf of Mexico and Cape Town, South Africa. She writes: "While placing my body in this network of black spatial history and the oil extraction industry of the present, I’m interested in composing what I call an orchestra intimacy... [to explore] indelible ties of geography, economy, time, sensoria and what it means to be a human body of these ecologies." Her participation in Feverish World is supported by the Molly Ruprecht Fund.
NATALIE JEREMIJENKO
Trained in art, biochemistry, and engineering, Natalie Jeremijenko blends multiple disciplines to create real-life experiments that enable social change. The New York Times has written that Jeremijenko “reimagines environmentalism as a kind of open-ended game” that aims to respond to the “crisis of agency,” or “what can we do?” Jeremijenko has taught at New York University (where she directs the xDesign Environmental Health Clinic & Lab), Yale, UC San Diego, and the Royal College of Art in London; exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, the Victoria and Albert Museum London, MOMA, and the Kuenstlerhaus Vienna; been profiled in Salon (“The Artist as Mad Scientist“), the New York Times Magazine (“The Artist Who Talks with the Fishes“), Technology Review, and The Economist; and been named a Rockefeller Fellow and a VIDA Art and Aritificial Life International Pioneer Prize winner. Her recent projects reimagine urban farming, zoos, environmental health, transportation, and cross-species adventures, and include a proposal to incorporate Burlington into “PLAN B,” a multi-city strategy (including Boulder, Bogota, Berlin, Beijing, Barcelona, and Brisbane) for creative urban infrastructure transformation to meet and exceed the Paris Climate Convention goals.
David Rothenberg
David Rothenberg is a professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. His books include Survival of the Beautiful (2011), Thousand Mile Song (2008), Why Birds Sing (2005), Sudden Music (2002), Blue Cliff Record: Zen Echoes (2001), Hand´s End: Technology and the Limits of Nature (1993), and Always the Mountains (2003). He is a clarinetist who has played with whales (Whale Music, 2008), cicadas and water crickets (Bug Music, 2013; Cicada Dream Band, 2014), birds (Why Birds Sing, 2005), and humans including Marilyn Crispell, Scanner, Hamid Drake, Peter Gabriel, and the Karnataka College of Percussion. He edited Terra Nova: Nature and Culture and its book series, and has written for Orion, The Nation, Wired, and The New York Times. Why Birds Sing has been published in seven languages and was turned into a BBC documentary.
LINDA WEINTRAUB
Linda Weintraub is a curator, educator, artist, and theorist of eco-art. Her books include What’s Next? Eco-Materialism and Contemporary Art (2018), TO LIFE! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet (2012), Avant-Guardians: Textlets in Art and Ecology (2007), and Art on the Edge and Over: Searching for Art’s Meaning in Contemporary Society (1996). She directed the Edith C. Blum Art Institute at Bard College and was Henry Luce Professor of Emerging Arts at Oberlin College. Weintraub has curated over sixty exhibitions including “Dear Mother Nature,” “Lo and Behold: Visionary Art in the Post-Modern Era,” “Process and Product: The Making of Eight Contemporary Masterworks,” and “Landmarks: New Site Proposals by Twenty Pioneers of Environmental Art.”
NELE AZEVEDO
Néle Azevedo is a Sao Paolo-based sculptor and video and installation artist best known for her “Minimum Monument” ice sculptures -- ephemeral urban space interventions of “melting men” that have been exhibited in cities around the world. Adopted by environmentalists as visual metaphors for climate change, the monuments are intended to “invert” the canons of the public monument: as Azevedo describes it, “in the place of the hero, the anonym; in the place of the solidity of the stone, the ephemeral process of the ice; in the place of the monument scale, the minimum scale of the perishable bodies.”
ANNE STRAINCHAMPS & STEVE PAULSON
Anne Strainchamps and Steve Paulson are co-founders and, respectively, the host and the executive producer, of Peabody Award winning public radio program To the Best of Our Knowledge. Since its founding on Wisconsin Public Radio in 1990, the show has modeled the transdisciplinary intellectual curiosity that the Feverish World Symposium aims to celebrate and cultivate. Between them, Strainchamps and Paulson have covered topics as wide as “Culture and Surveillance,” “Science vs. Religion,” “Apocalyptic Fiction,” “Colonizing Mars,” and “The History of Slapstick,” and interviewed thinkers as diverse as E. O. Wilson, Richard Powers, Tariq Ramadan, and Karen Armstrong. Paulson, who is the author of Atoms and Eden: Conversations on Religion and Science, interviewed Bruno Latour last October and will be facilitating the conversation with Latour and guest panelists at Feverish World.
PAULINE JENNINGS
Pauline Jennings is a dancer, choreographer, and intermedia performance artist, whose work has been performed around the world. Her work [radical] signs of life was, in the words of media artist Heidi Boisvert, “one of the first large-scale game-based experiences to use wearable biotechnology to integrate networked bodies and interactive dance.” Jennings is Co-Artistic Director of the experimental dance troupe Double Vision. Her current research seeks to identify and dissolve barriers between being human and wild. Her collaborative multi-channel dance piece Becoming Human will premiere at Burlington City Arts this fall.
JONATHAN HARRIS
Jonathan Harris is an Internet artist, digital storyteller, computer scientist, and designer, whose work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. His works include the Yahoo Time Capsule (2006), We Feel Fine (2006), Universe (2007), The Whale Hunt (2007), I Want You To Want Me (2008), I Love Your Work (2013), Network Effect (2015), and A Silent Place (2018). The Whale Hunt is a database including over 3,000 photographs from a stay with an Inupiat family in Barrow, Alaska. Other works document happiness, the emotional life of the World Wide Web, queer sex work, online dating, and more. He has described his work as "a kind of medicine": "I look at where the world or society appears to be, and I try to design little medicines that go in and transform people in subtle ways." Jonathan lives in Shelburne, Vermont, where he directs the Shelburne Institute.
CHARD DENIORD
Chard deNiord is the current Poet Laureate of Vermont and the author of several books of poetry including I Would Lie To You If I Could (2018), Interstate (2015), Speaking in Turn (in collaboration with Tony Sanders, 2011), The Double Truth (2011), Night Mowing (2005), Sharp Golden Thorn (2003), and Asleep in the Fire (1990). He holds an M.Div. from Yale Divinity School, has taught comparative religion and philosophy at the Putney School in Vermont, co-founded and directed the New England College MFA Program in Poetry, and is a professor of English at Providence College. He lives in Westminster West, Vermont with his wife, Liz.
FRED WISEMAN
Frederick M. Wiseman is an Abenaki historian, artist, and paleo-ethnobotanist, former director of Humanities at Johnson State College, and current director of the Wobanakik Heritage Center in Swanton, Vermont. Trained in archaeology and ecology, he was a Principal Research Scientist at MIT's Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology. His books include The Voice of the Dawn: An Autohistory of the Abenaki Nation (2001), Reclaiming the Ancestors: Decolonizing a Taken Prehistory of the Far Northeast (2005), and Seven Sisters: Wabanaki Seeds and Food Systems (2018). He is a member of the Abenaki Nation of Missisquoi (St. Francis-Sokoki Band).
WEATHER WARLOCK
Weather Warlock is a New Orleans, Louisiana-based heavy drone band which uses sun, wind, rain, and temperature to control a low-voltage “monster” analog synthesizer designed by Quintronics. Weather Warlock has played with members of Sonic Youth, the Sun Ra Arkestra, Wilco, and Matmos. Performing as Quintron and Miss Pussycat, or with a variable array of other musicians, their albums include Satan is Dead (1998), The Unmasked Organ Light-Year of Infinity Man (2000), Sucre du Sauvage (2011), and (as Weather Warlock) Sunset Waits for No Man (2015) and Headless Falcon (2017). They only play during sunrise or sunset. Their musical weather station broadcasts at weatherfortheblind.org.
THOM SOKOLOSKI & JENNY ANNE McCOWAN
Thom Sokoloski has worked for over 40 years as a theatre and visual artist, producer, director, curator, composer, and consultant. He has worked with LaMama Theatre and the Open Theatre in New York City, Jerzy Grotowski's Polish Lab Theatre and L'Ecole Jacques Lecoq in Paris, and co-founded The Theatre Centre and Autumn Leaf Performance in Toronto. His environmental and site-specific works include productions in a Viking castle (of R. Murray Schafer’s opera RA), on New York City’s Roosevelt Island (The Encampment), in Queensland in Australia (where he worked with a local Aboriginal community to develop Ghost Net), and in parks, rivers, and ravines in Toronto, Ottawa, and elsewhere. Jenny Anne McCowan is a choreographer, arts educator, and Education Director for The Magenta Foundation's Flash Forward Incubator Program.
ANNE BOURNE
Anne Bourne is a Toronto-based cellist, keyboardist, vocalist, and composer who has worked and performed with Loreena McKennitt, Jane Siberry, Sarah MacLachlan, and leading figures in avant-garde and improvised music including Pauline Oliveros, Fred Frith, Tony Conrad, David Grubbs, and Susie Ibarra. She has been a resident composer with the Robert Desrosier Dance Theatre, and has worked for many years applying composer and innovator Pauline Oliveros’s “deep listening” practice in leading “community soundings” and “deep listening intensives” (which she will bring to a Saturday afternoon workshop at Feverish World).
DAVID NEIWEEM
As a professional operatic and art song vocalist and conductor, David Neiweem has performed at festivals and concert stages around the world. He has been music director and conductor of several choral societies, and currently serves as music director of the Pitten (Austria) International Music Festival and of the First Congregational Church of Burlington. As a long-time professor of music at the University of Vermont, he directs the university’s choirs, teaches vocal studies and conducting, and is the University Organist and Carillonneur. His original compositions will be heard on church bells across downtown Burlington during Feverish World.
TINA ESCAJA
Tina Escaja is Distinguished Professor of Romance Languages and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Vermont. She has published extensively on gender and contemporary Latin American and Spanish poetry and technology. A pioneer in electronic literature, her creative work transcends the traditional book format, leaping into digital art, robotics, augmented reality and multimedia projects exhibited in museums and galleries internationally. She is a founding member of the performance group Feminist Against BS.
Aviva Rahmani
Aviva Rahmani is an ecologically oriented performance and multi-media artist, painter, and photographer, whose public projects often involve collaborative and interdisciplinary community teams with scientists, planners, and citizens. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at The 2007 Venice Biennale, The Independent Museum of Contemporary Art in Cyprus, the National Centres of Contemporary Art in Ekaterinburg and Moscow, and the KRICT in Daejeon, Korea. Her work Ghost Nets (1990-2000) applied trigger point theory to ecological restoration. In 2002, her community action project Blue Rocks helped restore degraded wetlands on Vinalhaven Island, Maine. Her Blued Trees Symphony (2015 to present), which has received numerous awards and been exhibited internationally, has included A Mock Trial held at the Cardozo Law School, New York City.
JASON DAVIS
Jason Davis is a double-bass player, environmental educator, and leader of the environmental sound/improvisation ensemble Earthsound, which brings musical improvisation to field recordings of the natural world. As part of a fellowship with EE Capacity's Community Climate Change Education Fellowship, he developed Climate Stories Project, an “interactive forum for sharing stories about the effects of climate change on our lives and in our communities.” He is currently based in Montreal, Québec
GAHLORD DEWALD
Gahlord Dewald is a composer and improvising musician who works in new, experimental, and electroacoustic genres. He has collaborated with Barre Phillips, Raphe Malik, Peter Serkin, and Eve Beglarian, and has performed at Waking Windows, the North Country Electronic Music Festival, and CoS:INE. He founded Community of Sound, an experimental music incubator in Burlington, Vermont.
Laura May-Collado
Laura May-Collado is a marine biologist at the University of Vermont and CIMAR-Universidad de Costa Rica, who studies the evolution of acoustic communication in marine animals. Among her research foci are the application of remote underwater recording systems and other tools to study transformation of marine soundscapes, including increasing noise levels, as well as habitat loss and overexploitation in their impacts on marine mammals. Through the organization Panacetacea, she advises the government of Panama on conservation of whales and dolphins.
JANE ADAMS
Jane Adams is the Data Visualization Artist in Residence at the University of Vermont Complex Systems Center, where she collaborates with fellow researchers to make the complex comprehensible through engaging visualizations. Her work celebrates the relationship between science and the arts through trans-disciplinary graphical explorations of holonic and cybernetic systems.
ADRIAN IVAKHIV
Adrian Ivakhiv is the Steven Rubenstein Professor for Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Vermont. His books include Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona (2001), Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, and Nature (2013), and Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realism for Turbulent Times (2018). He is a professor of environmental thought and culture, and coordinator of the UVM EcoCultureLab.