Art as Engineering
In Conversation with Tega Brain
Artwork from Tega Brain
Trained in environmental engineering and operating fluently inside digital systems, Tega Brain builds what she calls “eccentric engineering” projects that expose the absurdities of technological solutionism by pushing them to their logical edge. Whether she’s routing networks through environmental data, designing systems to deliberately obfuscate personal information, or proposing alternative carbon offset methodologies, her work reframes automation and data as ecological questions rather than simple tools. Exhibited everywhere from the Whitney to ZKM and grounded in both institutional critique and technical literacy, Brain occupies a rare position. She understands the machinery well enough to subvert it. She doesn’t reject technology, she destabilizes its assumptions and asks what it would mean to engineer infrastructures that answer to planetary limits instead of market incentives.
In projects where environmental conditions directly control a digital system, what kinds of agency or decision-making show up that you couldn’t have planned for in advance?
When environmental conditions are invited to become actors in how a system operates like they are in the Solar Protocol project, decisions that get made often feel misaligned with human intention. Solar Protocol is a planetary-scale network of solar-powered servers, installed and maintained by volunteers around the world. The servers collectively host the Solar Protocol web platform, serving it from whichever server is in the most sunshine and therefore generating the most energy, at the time. Decisions about how network traffic is routed and where the computational work of generating and sending out the site is done, are automated according to a solar logic derived from season, time of day and weather conditions across the planet.
In this system, weather patterns shut off servers and operations sometimes can slow down to the extent that they feel like they are on a completely different time scale. What emerges is a form of agency rooted in latency, noise, and persistence rather than human-centered choice. These moments reveal how much decision-making in computational systems is already distributed across infrastructures, materials, and temporal scales we don’t usually credit as actors. The point of letting environments decide on certain operations depending on available resources or their limits, is that you don’t have to plan and predict these things via modeling.
Eccentric engineering resists optimization as a default value. Can you describe a moment in a project where inefficiency or unpredictability became a deliberate ethical constraint?
Optimization is the process of designing a system to fulfill a particular set of priorities. The problem is that those priorities, and the order they’re placed in, are rarely questioned by the people doing the optimizing. Optimization quietly imports values like efficiency, scalability, and control, especially in environmental tech.
But through the concept of eccentric engineering, I’m trying to ask, efficient for who? Control for who? If we take seriously the idea that humans are not hermetically sealed off from the world, and are instead co-dependent within ecosystems, then that “who” should include the other lifeforms we live with. However, designing systems that attend to the needs of those lifeforms often looks like inefficiency when compared to extractive, human-centered systems.
That tension is really what eccentric engineering is about. It’s an attempt to design systems that foreground different values and priorities. For example, one of my earliest works, Coin Operated Wetland, proposes a laundromat designed to form a mutualistic relationship with a wetland. The wetland depends on the human using the machine, and the human depends on the wetland for the system to function. It looks slow and fragile compared to a conventional laundromat, but it’s intentionally designed to support biodiversity and the welfare of others alongside the needs of the human participant.
Many of your projects are intentionally designed as provisional systems. What guides your decision to keep a system open-ended rather than fully resolved?
I don’t really trust projects that claim to be finished, especially when they’re dealing with messy ecological or political issues. Keeping things provisional is a way of admitting that we don’t fully understand what we’re intervening in. It also leaves space for the system to be misused, questioned, or reinterpreted over time. For me, open-endedness isn’t about indecision, it’s about resisting the pressure to wrap things up too neatly when the underlying conditions are anything but settled.
In your experimental carbon offsetting projects, which assumption embedded in contemporary carbon accounting felt most important to unsettle?
Probably the most important assumption to unsettle is the idea that carbon can be cleanly abstracted from place and responsibility. Offsetting assumes you can cancel out emissions here by doing something vaguely “good” somewhere else, as if social and ecological contexts don’t matter. Carbon accounting turns the atmosphere into a spreadsheet, and once you do that, a lot of ethical questions disappear.
What’s especially troubling is how deeply conservative carbon offsetting is. It preserves existing global hierarchies between the Global North and Global South. The North is largely responsible for the climate crisis, yet if you look at carbon registries, most carbon removal or reduction projects are located in the Global South. The onus of change is pushed onto the communities least responsible for the crisis.
Our project, which generates carbon offsets from instances of industrial sabotage and direct action, deliberately exaggerates and misaligns these logics. By doing so, we try to make the abstraction at the heart of offsetting feel strange again, and a little uncomfortable.
Your smell-based dating project and other works use humor or sensory dissonance to expose infrastructural logics. What does absurdity make visible that technical critique often doesn’t?
Absurdity gets under your skin in a way that white papers don’t. Smell, humor, awkwardness, those things land before you have time to intellectually agree or disagree. They make the horrific issues I work with, like climate violence, incarceration, and oppression through data and computing, easier to look at and sit with. I think absurdity is useful because it exposes how bizarre many normalized systems actually are. Once something makes you laugh or recoil, it becomes harder to accept it as just “the way things work.”
Working across art, engineering, and academic contexts, where have institutional structures most clearly shaped (or limited) the kinds of systems you’re able to build?
Each context has its own invisible rules. Academia often wants clarity and rigor, art spaces want provocation or resolution, and engineering environments want things to work smoothly and efficiently. Moving between them makes those expectations really obvious.
In your research on automation and ecology, what shifts in ecological thinking concern you most, and where do you still see room for alternative imaginaries?
What worried me most a year ago is very different from what worries me now. A year ago, a lot of the concern was about how to address the multiple ecological crises we’re facing. Under the Trump administration, the question has shifted to whether they’ll be addressed at all, and whether the knowledge infrastructures we rely on to even understand these crises will survive. Those infrastructures are being rapidly dismantled. It’s horrifying, and the U.S. is currently doing irreversible damage to global efforts around climate change and the extinction crisis.
I still see a lot of room for alternative imaginaries in practices that emphasize other ways of living — valuing maintenance and care, and acting from a position of partial knowledge rather than total control. But right now, regardless of occupation, there’s also an urgent need to find ways to resist this administration and the changes it’s making. Art and creative practice can be especially useful here because they’re often tied to community-building and to paying attention to specific contexts. They allow for ways of working that are weird, situated, and accountable.
