Please join the Visual Studies Research Institute for the first session of the Endless Summer Seminar, a presentation by Joe Riley, Ph.D. Candidate in the UC San Diego Department of Visual Arts. This seminar is co-organized by the Caltech Program in Visual Culture.

Passengers of Change is a co-laboratory of artists, historians, and scientists studying the seaweed Undaria pinnatifida (wakame), a globally migratory form of seaweed variously characterized as either invasive or benign, as a colonizing force or an opportunistic passenger of ecosystem change. This presentation will explore our co-laboratory’s recent work on Ballast Bench, an instrument that is part observation tank and part tool for studying Undaria. To understand the design of our study of Undaria in the form of a bench, and specifically as a bench weighted by simulated ballast water that doubles as the medium through which an out-of-place seaweed is promulgated and observed, this visual essay-lecture will explore interrelated accounts of maritime ballast and seaweeds as counterparts of political-economic and ecological change in coastal Southern California.

Presently a fellow at the Getty Research Institute, Joe Riley is an artist, historian, and Ph.D. candidate at UC San Diego Visual Arts in a joint environmental research program with Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation. His dissertation, “Fixing the Sea: Case Studies Toward a Critical Environmental History of Ocean Art and Science since 1970” foregrounds and critically examines histories and practices of interaction between artists, oceanographers, and marine life situated within Southern California’s university-military-research complex.

Please RSVP to [email protected].