OPEN CALL FOR NYU STUDENTS & ALUMNI
Retooling: Art, Ecology, & Climate Adaptation
Lightning Presentations
Climate Week NYC
Presented by MESH_ARTS in collaboration with BioBAT Art Space
What happens when art shifts from representing ecological problems to actively participating in how we understand, navigate, and respond to them?
MESH_ARTS invites current NYU / CUSP students and alumni, across disciplines, to propose 15-minute lightning presentations sharing projects, research, collaborations, experiments, prototypes, methodologies, or works in progress that demonstrate ecological tools.
We are especially interested in practices that move beyond representation toward tool-making, facilitation, education, experimentation, collective knowledge, and ecological infrastructure.
Alongside NYU CUSP students and alumni, the event will feature presentations from selected artists whose practices embody these approaches, creating a generative, community-oriented exchange that reflects diverse forms of ecological tool-making.
What might an ecological tool be?
A tool might be a physical object or prototype, but it might also be a method, system, workshop, platform, performance, mapping practice, material experiment, community process, speculative proposition, or way of gathering people and knowledge.
We welcome projects that consider how creative practice can work with natural forces, scientific research, technological systems, communities, and environments to generate new forms of participation, understanding, and action.
Projects might engage questions such as:
- How can artistic practice function as ecological infrastructure?
- What happens when the artist shifts from producer to facilitator, educator, researcher, collaborator, or infrastructure builder?
- How can art, science, engineering, design, and technology generate new forms of environmental knowledge?
- What kinds of tools can help communities understand, experience, or respond to climate change differently?
- How can creative practice translate complex ecological systems into accessible forms of public engagement?
- What new forms of collective knowledge and civic imagination can emerge through interdisciplinary collaboration?
Who Should Apply?
This open call welcomes current NYU undergraduate and graduate students, as well as NYU alumni, and faculty, from all schools, programs, and fields of study.
We particularly encourage interdisciplinary approaches spanning art, design, poetry, architecture, environmental studies, engineering, science, technology, urban studies, performance, media, public policy, and related fields.
You do not need to identify as an artist to participate.
Projects may be completed, ongoing, speculative, or in development. Individual and collaborative projects are welcome.
Format
Selected participants will each give an in-person 15-minute lightning presentation as part of an afternoon of short presentations, conversation, and interdisciplinary exchange.
Rather than a formal academic paper, we encourage participants to introduce a project, question, experiment, methodology, or proposition that can open a larger conversation about creative practice and ecological action.
About Retooling
During Climate Week NYC, MESH_ARTS, in collaboration with BioBAT Art Space, presents Retooling: Art, Ecology, & Climate Adaptation, an exhibition and public program exploring artistic practices that generate tools for ecological engagement and climate adaptation.
The exhibition considers artistic practice as a form of ecological infrastructure and public pedagogy, one in which interdisciplinary collaboration can produce new forms of environmental literacy, civic imagination, and collective action.
Through projects engaging shade equity, atmospheric adaptation, material experimentation, and other forms of creative conversion and aid, Retooling asks how creatives and their collaborators might move from representing environmental crises toward creating conditions, methods, and tools for responding to it.
Participating artists: Mari Nagem, Joaquin Fargas, Esteban Agosin-Otero, Peter Yeadon, and Laura Splan
To Apply
Please submit:
- Name and NYU affiliation — school/program, degree, and graduation year or expected graduation year
- Project or presentation title
- 2–5 images or a link to relevant work, if applicable
- A brief statement describing how your project connects to the theme of art as ecological tool, method, or infrastructure (maximum 100 words)
DEADLINE EXTENDED: September, 20th
Announcement of acceptance: September 13th
Presentation Date: Sunday, September, 27th
Location: MESH_ARTS at the Old American Can Factory 232 3rd St, Gallery C302,
Submit: info@meshartcenter.net