Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is an artist who was born in 1982 and lives in London, UK. Dr. Ginsberg has been dedicated to exploring the connections between technology and nature. She went to school in the U.S. and the U.K. and has degrees in architecture and design interaction. Although she is referred to as an interaction designer, in one of the interviews she clearly expressed that she is an artist: “I feel like I’m an artist, although I really enjoy operating within the design world…It is very hard to cross that boundary in terms of all sorts of different economies. (Ginsberg) ” Being as an installation artist, she has spent a lot of time in various fields of sciences, such as synthetic biology and artificial intelligence, and become the lead author of Synthetic Aesthetics. Most of her works use technology to present a corner of nature. For example, the smell and look of extinct flowers and models of future creatures after a mass extinction. Also, her works are mostly installations with a background and research through biotechnology, with the interactions aspect with humans.
Dr. Ginsberg’s design thesis is to explore how the thinking of “better” shapes the world. In many of her talks and passages where the audience can see the word “better” is the most important phrase in her works. Since she has been involved in several fields of science where everyone’s goal is to design for a better future, those experiences triggered her thinking into the definition of better. She begin curious about the different aspects of better, then she started to explore the idea of “better” by creating interactive installations about a “better future”. The different perspectives of better are the main theme in Dr. Ginsberg’s works. She is interested in how the idea of better shapes science, engineering, and design.
Dr. Ginsberg is an active interactive installation artist nowadays, her latest work made in 2021 called Pollinator Pathmaker is to let people care about plants and pollinators by changing how people see them. It is an interactive website where people can grow their own garden to endanger pollinators and plants. Her most notable works are mostly about the results of human activity in the global environment. Resurrecting the Sublime being one of her well-known works is a collaborated installation art showing the recreated environment and smells of extinct flowers using CGI, smell research, and biotech engineering. “Resurrecting the Sublime asks us to contemplate our actions, and potentially change them for the future. (Ginsberg)” Dr. Ginsberg likes to give the audience an immersive experience. In one of the works called Machine Auguries, in a room, the beautiful natural songs of birds are slowly replaced by artificial sounds to express the mass extinction of birds. By creating an immersive experience, people can feel the destruction of nature deeply and thus think more about a better future. Dr. Ginsberg is also an active writer and speaker to advocates for people to consider how different aspects of “better” will change the world.
Being an artist, Dr. Ginsberg created interactive art pieces to promote the reflection on the definition of better and the problems of the environment human-faced in the contemporary world. Her combination of nature and technology is unique with the involvements of different fields of frontier bioscience. She believes a better world is not created by only artists and designers but everyone. “ I can contribute as an individual, and as a citizen, we can all contribute. (Ginsberg)”
Works Cited
“Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg.” Youtube, Columbia GSAPP, 16 Oct. 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEeBeEfGoYU. Accessed 15 Feb. 2022.
“‘Better Nature’ – an Interview with Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg.” Youtube, Vitra Design Museum, 24 Oct. 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jV_xZUtDhO0. Accessed 15 Feb. 2022.
Ginsberg, Alxendra Daisy. “About.” Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, https://www.daisyginsberg.com/about. Simpson, Veronica. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg – Interview: ‘We Need to Radically Rethink Our Behaviours, Globally’. Studio International: Visual Arts, Design and Architecture, 14 May 2020, https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/alexandra-daisy-ginsberg-interview-we-need-to-radically-rethink-our-behaviours-globally.
