Current Adapatations Resident Ash Arder welcomes members of the community to experience a work-in-progress series of interactive sound sculptures reflecting on the shared histories and tactile experiences of farmers and farm machines. The works are inspired by historic and contemporary technical documentation of agricultural processes and innovation. The works further Ash’s curiosity around what can happen when the experiences of plants and machines are taken into consideration when reflecting on the relationship between the agricultural industry and western culture at large.

Ash Arder (b. 1988, Flint, Michigan) is a transdisciplinary artist whose research-based approach works to expose, deconstruct or reconfigure physical and conceptual systems – especially those relating to ecology. Arder’s highly flexible practice examines interspecies relations and natural phenomena primarily through historical and popular culture lenses.

Statement: At the very core, my creative practice is concerned with the idea of relation. Relation is, for me, a basic tenet for understanding how collaboration between ideas and entities might occur. It also acts as a guide for interpreting and making tangible my own patterns of thought and logic. I use the idea of speculative collaboration as a framework to expose, deconstruct or reconfigure physical and conceptual systems – especially those relating to ecology.

These systems and “exercises” take on forms including installation, sculpture, sound, drawing, electronics, video and performance. Each ponders the role of agency, both active and passive, in co-creating an event or phenomenon. I am interested in complicating viewers’ own understanding of their proximity to and participation in the systems and cycles reflected in my work and subsequently at larger societal and ecological scales. These complications or moments of tension between living things, objects and space serve as a catalyst for interrogating the very conditions responsible for the glitch. My work and research probe historical events and pop culture (future history) for insight into what I think of as “relational glitches,” or ruptures in empathy.