About

Dr Josh Wodak is an artist and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. His work critically engages with cultural and ethical entanglements between environmental engineering and conservation biology as means to mitigate species extinction and biodiversity loss in the Anthropocene.

With anthropogenic climate change constituting an unplanned and unintentional experiment on the biosphere and atmosphere, his work explores the ethics and efficacy of plans to intentionally mitigate human impact on the biosphere, through synthetic biology, and on the atmosphere, through climate engineering. Drawing on the fields of Environmental Humanities and Science and Technology Studies, this work is produced through practice based research in art and museum exhibitions on the Anthropocene.

He holds a BA (Honours) in Anthropology (Sydney University, 2002), a PhD in Interdisciplinary Cross-Cultural Research (Australian National University, 2011) and has exhibited his media art, sculpture and interactive installations in art galleries, museums and festivals across Australia and internationally. These projects include: when i was a buoyant, photo-portraits of climate change data physically projected onto participants' bodies to illustrate sea level rise measured against the human body; jubilee venn diagrams?, video-portraits that animate diagrams of climate change trajectories to form Cartesian graphs with the human body; Facing Futures Free From Fear, an audiovisual installation that maps global carbon dioxide emissions onto a 12metre long sculpted heat map rising from domestic-scale floor to ceiling; ISEA Bright Future, an interactive audiovisual installation powered by participants' cycling, where participants collaboratively control a 3D light and sound sculpture of pre-extinction and post-extinction evolutionary trajectories; and shape Things To come, an immersive sculpture that maps projected sea level rise onto physical sites of a city, to depict future sea shores from different climate trajectories produced through different geoengineering interventions..

Before joining ICS in 2020 he was a Lecturer at UNSW Art & Design; a Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery Project 'Understanding Australia in The Age of Humans: Localising the Anthropocene'; and a Key Researcher of the Andrew Mellon Australia-Pacific Observatory in Environmental Humanities, Sydney Environment Institute, University of Sydney.

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Current

Senior Research Fellow
Institute for Culture and Society
Western Sydney University

Chief Investigator
ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology

Adjunct Senior Lecturer
School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences
Faculty of Science, University of New South Wales

- The Habitat of Time | group exhibition | Arts Catalyst: Centre for Art, Science & Technology, London | 20 Feb - 14 March 2020 | Curator: Dr Julie Louise Bacon

- The Habitat of Time | group exhibition | Incinerator Gallery, Sydney | 16 June - 6 July 2020 | Curator: Dr Julie Louise Bacon.

Recent

- The Habitat of Time | group exhibition | Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre | 19 Apr - 6 May 2018 | Curator: Dr Julie Louise Bacon

- Fielding | group exhibition | Sunken Courtyard, RMIT Melbourne | October 2018 | Curators: Catherine Clover and Jordan Lacey.

 

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