On 21 October, artist and environmental engineer Tega Brain will give a lecture on the history and limits of representing ecosystems through computation. Forest to Grassland: Can a Planet Be Computed? will trace developments from mid-twentieth-century cybernetic ecology to contemporary planetary simulations.
Brain will also present artworks that question the quantification of nature and the translation of environmental processes into data. The lecture is part of Making Sense of Data, the 2026 Data Driven Design course examining the materialities of AI.
Brain’s practice connects ecology, data, automation and infrastructure. She teaches Integrated Design and Media at NYU and co-authored Code as Creative Medium with Golan Levin.
Date: 21 October 2026, 14:00