📢 BichEden: ParaDoxa by Pat Badani in collaboration with Mariel Martinez
🗓 DATE & TIME: August 30 to October 26, 2025. Open to the public: 11 am to 5 pm on Sat and Sun. Opening: Saturday August 30, 2025 from 3 – 5 pm. Artist Talk on August 30, 2025.
📍 LOCATION: Harvestworks Art and Technology Program. Building 10a, Nolan Park, Governors Island. New York City, USA.
Visitors need to spend about 20 to 30 minutes to experience the installation.
BichEden: ParaDoxa animates ecosystems as living storylines — part-science, part-spirit, part-archive. Exhibited as a large-scale, screen-based installation composed of computer-generated 3D animations, the project builds portals for climate storytelling about ecosystem regeneration in Mexico’s Coral Reef, Alpine, and Rainforest regions. Virtual ethnobotanical research, regenerative acoustic ecology research, and Red List databases on endangered organisms inform the computer-generated artifacts, grounding the project in real-world environmental concerns.
Intending to expand worldwide understanding of ecological interdependence, “BichEden: ParaDoxa” engages in climate storytelling informed by efforts to regenerate Oceanic, Alpine, and Rainforest ecosystems in Mexico.
At the project’s base is virtual ethnobotanical research in Red List databases that catalog endangered flora and fauna impacting bioecological food chains in these ecosystems. The soundscapes are informed by regenerative acoustic ecology research that seeks to understand the impacts of human generated noise on different ecologies. The resulting computer-generated ‘still life’ artifacts’ re-imagine species interactions in restored sites.
“BichEden: Oceanic Banquet” imagines new colonies of organisms in a restored Great Mayan Reef; “BichEden: Rainforest” imagines a reconditioned Mayan Forest informed by Lacandon cosmology and curative herbology; and “BichEden: Alpine” imagines adaptable organisms that sleep and come back to life when conditions are favorable in the Iztaccíhuatl volcano.
The work evokes alternative worlds that enmesh counterfactual sequences and fictional formations drawing from biology and ecology, and from mythical, spiritual, and historical indicators. These “science fiction” readings retain enough actuality to make them plausible while underscoring the tremendous influence of electronic technologies and the sciences in shaping individual and cultural perceptions made visible in expanded understandings of materialities and realities.
The project constitutes an artistic investigation into the possibilities of precomputed generative environments applied to 3D animation. Starting from initial models captured through photogrammetry, the project involved the complete digital reconstruction of the pieces, rethinking their structure and behavior through procedural logic. The work integrates a combination of bone systems, inverse kinematics (IK), physics simulations, procedural deformers via Geometry Nodes, algorithmic controllers based on noise and wave functions, and generative shaders designed to dynamically produce textures and surface properties.
These components enable the creation of a complex computational ecosystem where the digital models acquire organic behaviors, autonomous dynamics, and non-linear transformations arising from the interaction between predefined parameters and procedural processes. “BichEden: ParaDoxa” thus positions itself within contemporary practices of digital generative art, interrogating notions of control, autonomy, unpredictability, and aesthetic emergence within virtual environments. The work proposes a reflection on the boundaries between conscious aesthetic planning and the capacity of computational systems to generate emergent forms and behaviors, situating itself at the intersection of assisted animation, procedural simulation, and algorithmic generation of digital matter.
Pat Badani in collaboration with Mariel Martinez.
Pat Badani is an artist, writer, and scholar born in Argentina. Throughout her densely woven research-creation journey she has drawn from the fields of art, science, and technology to develop projects that inspect social, biological, and technological networks. Projects have been recently shown in curated, international new media events: Festival de la Imagen (Colombia); ELO – Electronic Literature Organization (Canada); and Technoetic Arts, DeTAO (China). Profiled in LEONARDO Journal; Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism; and Artelogie Journal (EHESS, France); her works have been discussed in anthologies such as The Performing Observer: Writings on Contemporary Art, Performance, and Photography, ed. Martin Patrick (Intellect Press, Bristol, UK) and Advances in Visual Methodology, ed. Sara Pink (Sage publications, London). In 2024, Badani received a major award from The Canada Council for the Arts to develop “BichEden: ParaDoxa”.
Pat Badani’s projects have been distinguished with over 20 awards and commissions by the Canada Council for the Arts; Illinois Arts Council; DCASE; National Endowment for the Arts; the Robert Heinecken Trust; Harvestworks; Festival Internacional de la Imagen; Art Souterrain; and recognized for leading-edge work by Creative Capital, Art Matters, and AWAW, in the U.S.A. Badani exhibits her projects broadly in North and South America, Europe, and Asia, in electronic media festivals, galleries, and museums. She has participated in international symposia with her essays and talks in over 15 countries, and her works have been critically surveyed in conference panel discussions, in scholarly journals, and in art history anthologies. She is former full-time faculty at ILSTU (Integrated Media); Acting Director at Colombia College, Chicago (Interdisciplinary Arts); and Editor-in-Chief of Media-N Journal, New Media Caucus, in the U.S.A. Since 2017 she serves on the board of directors of ISEA International overseeing the continuation of the annual symposia. (https://www.patbadani.net/)
Mariel Martinez currently collaborates with Pat Badani on the “BichEden” project using a range of technologies including photogrammetry and 3D models to explore the edge of physical and digital realms within food chains. Mariel is a New York based computer scientist and co-founder of artpoet.io. She specializes in technology consulting, working with artists in creating projects based on emerging technologies.
PRESS QUOTES
1. Pat Badani imaginatively addresses queer ecology and object relations, often using food to create photo-sculptural works examining ecology, poetics, and technology. (RE: GNERATIVE Festival Internacional de la Imagen, 2025, Bogota, Colombia.)
2. Badani’s artistic practice mixes culinary, artistic, and environmental materials, forms, and commentary. It also explores its shaping as a work of media art, both on past media art histories and the current, ongoing, debates about human and nonhuman relations and futures. (Claudia Costa Pederson, PhD. Artelogie #20, 2023, Paris, France)
3. (Badani’s artwork) suggests that although new models of creating and co-existing are rapidly emerging, moving from resilience to transformation may only be achieved through developing a holistic view of our relationship with digital technologies – namely, through understanding both their dormant potentialities and their multiple black boxes. (Bill Balaskas, PhD. “Digital Sustainability/From Resistance to Transformation”, DRHA 2022, London, England.
4. Pat Badani has an interdisciplinary research practice whose methods, languages, and strategies result in a work full of connections that function through associations of ideas, or visual images, presented as “research in progress”. (Catherine Bédard, PhD. “Transgenic culture and global art: Pat Badani’s AL GRANO Project, Nouvelle Reveu d’esthetique #8, 2011, Paris, France.)
@Pat Badani
https://www.linkedin.com/in/pat-badani-pb1951
https://www.facebook.com/pat.badani
https://www.instagram.com/patbadani
COLLABORATORS
1) Mariel Martinez (Computer Scientist)
2) Dr. Gabreille Beans (Evolutionary Biologist)
3) Dr. Keith Larson (Transdisciplinary Ecologist)
4) Kim Nucci (Technologist)
1. Netweaving at CAA, 2025 in “The Art Equation/Now Be Here”, interview by Patricia Ortega, PhD. (March 13, 2025): https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-z4zac-183e1a1
2. Particle Episode 2: Pat Badani in “UCLA Art/Sci”, interview by Victoria Vesna, PhD. April 6, 2020.
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