### Tega Brain

Tega Brain is an artist and environmental engineer working at intersection of art, engineering and ecology. She makes eccentric engineering, reimagining quotidian technologies to address their politics. Her work takes the form of site specific interventions, dysfunctional devices, experimental infrastructures and information representations. She is currently a resident at Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology, she also does things at the School for Poetic Computation, and is full-time faculty at SUNY Purchase. In 2013, was awarded an early career fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts.

## Presenting

### Eccentric WiFi: Networks with others

Media are not only devices of information; they are also agencies of order.
John Durham Peters, 2015

Technologies are dynamic agents that coproduce our environments and social structures through material, psychological and (more recently) algorithmic interactions. Inevitably they embody the agendas and priorities of their makers. Yet if we are to adequately address urgent contemporary challenges like environmental destabilization and global inequality, both of which are tightly bound to trajectories of technological development, it is imperative that we re-think our technical systems and infrastructures to address the agendas of those currently outside of their scope of operation. I call work that responds to this challenge – eccentric engineering. Eccentric engineering sees experimental systems built with atypical design agendas and that restructure connections between humans and non-humans fostering mutual relationships. It approaches infrastructure not as a service but as a negotiation and attempts to privilege empathy over efficiency, co-dependence over independence and intimacy over autonomy.

The Radiotropism project applies an eccentric design approach to network technologies. As our lives become increasingly networked, we have developed a profound sensitivity to wireless topographies. We are radiotropic – we carefully prepare for the quiet zone of the subway and adjust our behaviors in response to subtle fluctuations in wireless signal strengths. The Radiotropism project probes this sensitivity, leveraging it in different ways. The project consists of a series of experimental WiFi routers that attempt to tie their user's network experience to natural phenomena in novel ways. This project explores the potential of creative work to intervene not only at an informational level, but at the level of infrastructure itself.