Excerpt: Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg in ‘LA+’

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is a globally recognized artist based in London. Formally trained in architecture and design interactions, she holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art. Ginsberg’s artwork, writing, and curatorial practices engage humanity’s increasingly fraught relationship with nature and technology. Specifically, the increasingly designed intersections and interactions between so-called nature and emerging technologies. In an excerpt from the latest issue of LA+ Journal, Javier Arpa Fernandez, lecturer in landscape architecture at Weitzman, and Christopher Marcinkoski, associate professor of landscape architecture at Weitzman, spoke to Ginsberg.

“In Conversation with Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg,” LA+ Journal, No. 16, fall 2022

To begin in an obvious place, can you speak to your relationship to the term speculation and speculative design?

I find the multiple meanings of the word “speculation” in the context of design both interesting and problematic. What we think it means can get lost in translation outside the very small field of speculative design. Outside of design, the word “speculation” is often associated with financial speculation, which when used with “design” can be interpreted as a desire to materialize a future rather than question it. Even within mainstream design, the term gets conflated with more commercial ideas of “doing work on spec” – in other words, for free. Back in 2010 I told someone I was a speculative designer and they joked, “Oh, so you want to be a designer?”

I did my master’s at the Royal College of Art between 2007 and 2009 in Design Interactions—a department led by Anthony (Tony) Dunne and Fiona Raby, and Tony later co-supervised my PhD. Design Interactions is associated with developing speculative design methods, which have since spread widely in many different directions. But in my own artistic practice, I’m interested in the methods Tony and Fiona were pursuing, with speculation grounded in a critical framework and used as a tool to question. Their approach had roots in the critical Italian Radical Design movement of the 1960s. I see this as different to related practices like design fiction, often used in more commercial settings, where there is a closer link to financial speculation and futures; there, speculative designs are used to create stories to bet on a future or find a particular path to a future to invest in. But despite these different motivations, the two are often described together as single practice.

In Design Interactions, we were experimentally using design as a tool to explore the social, cultural, and ethical implications of emerging technologies. There’s been a valid questioning of how critical it can be, given the elitist subject matter of the work and who it is done by, and that it’s often encountered as a gallery practice. What is speculative design for? Who is it for? Who is consulted? Whose stories are told? Who is the audience? Who benefits? There’s a lot to unpack as there are nuances to each project that emerge from a research practice, and generalization isn’t necessarily useful. Often my primary audience was the scientific community and each artwork was created with that audience in mind, responding to synthetic biology research and the field’s narratives; then they ended up in gallery spaces. But of course, I was practicing in a privileged space as a privileged person, and the issues I was exploring were much larger than the space I was working from and the knowledge I was drawing on.

Moving away from the term “speculation” itself and to its intentions, in my PhD, I looked at Foucault’s idea of heterotopia and my idea of “critical imaginaries.” I wanted to create spaces of imagination that were less about the implications of new technologies, which easily tends towards locating fictions in the future, and instead think about creating spaces where we can reflect back on the world today and the decisions being made now. Heterotopias are places that are other—not better or worse, like utopias or dystopias—but different. These spaces can be parallel worlds, in the future, in the past, or nowhere in particular. The body of work I have made since plays with these ideas of other and reflection.

With my latest commission for the Eden Project in Cornwall, UK, I am in some ways coming back to an earlier dream of being a landscape architect. Pollinator Pathmaker (2021–) is an artwork for pollinators, not for humans. As an artwork, it is more practical than my earlier speculative works—I have created an algorithm that designs planting schemes to maximize pollinator diversity, rather than maximize human aesthetic joy—but Pollinator Pathmaker also makes us ask what or who do we design for? It’s questioning whether art can be useful; if it isn’t in the gallery, what or who is it for? If I’m making art about the ecological crisis, what am I asking the audience to do? How can I offer agency, not just despair?

Do you see your work as being an agent of change?

Because my training was in architecture and in Design Interactions, not fine art, there’s always a question of solutionism hanging over my head. Can design be anything other than a discipline to solve problems? Can I avoid trying to solve problems? My PhD looked at how design as a practice of bettering—a process of changing an existing situation to a preferred or better one, to paraphrase Herbert Simon—leads to an assumption that design makes things better. But design is very context dependent. What is better in that context, whose idea of better is being realized, and who gets to decide? Most design today is operating under the influence of capitalism, and so the focus of design is on extraction and producing things to sell. But I’m curious about different kinds of design. Now I’m asking whether we can design for other species without human benefit. Is it possible for design to be altruistic or is design as a human activity exclusively serving our own self-interest? Are we inevitably focused on bettering for ourselves? “Bettering” nature, the environment that we are part of, ultimately serves our own interests.

My work with synthetic biology in the first 10 years of my practice meant embedding myself within a new field of technoscience to reflect what was going on within it—a way to pick up weak signals of the future and reflect on what was being proposed. But rather than asking an audience to pick a future—Is this one good or bad?—I wanted to make work that would have an impact on the present—enabling us to change in the present because that is where change happens; the present is where the futures we end up with are chosen. In the same way there is no one single future, there is no one single present. We are all experiencing different versions of a present from our different circumstances and positions. Rather than making a single vantage point to look at the future and choose one future from many, can you create a place to reflect back on multiple presents and, in turn, empower people to act now? It’s semantics, but for me that perspectival shift helps.

Following that line of thinking, much of my work in synthetic biology was aimed at synthetic biologists, rather than the general public: I hear you saying this, it leads me to this idea, here is a way to represent that, what is your response?—using the creation of a design object as an instrument of discourse. I think my work as an “agent of change” (if at all) was that approach.

My four works from 2019—Resurrecting the Sublime; The Substitute; The Wilding of Mars; and Machine Auguries—use technology as a vehicle to question our relationship with the natural world. These works were meant for the gallery space, which is problematic in its own way. It forced me to consider what I’m asking the audience to do with the work? The pieces were intended to elicit an emotion of loss, but if they are not directed at a specialist community that has the ability to actually enact change, what is the audience’s agency? There was a review of the Eco-Visionaries exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts (2019), which showed works by artists and designers responding to the planetary ecological emergency. It singled out The Substitute and said something to the effect of: “Ginsberg offers no answers.” I loved that. Why would we assume that artists or designers should or could have solutions to something as complex as this?

You’ve talked a bit about time, and the intention of your work to not actually be about the future but instead the present, but we wonder if you could say a bit about scale? So much of your work uses elements that are somehow immediately tangible to an audience— the plant, the rhino, the bird—as a means of engaging with or framing questions around larger systems.

That really comes from my Design Interactions training and the idea that you can take a familiar object and build a whole world around it to tell stories. That struck me in contrast to architecture—both from studying it and teaching it—where the goal often seems to be volume of production and comprehensive description at every scale. The Design Interactions critical design approach advocated for focused elaboration of one tangible thing, an object—from the future or the present, this world or another—and then to allude to how people might interact with that thing. The strange familiarity of interacting with a thing, even a new thing, allows people to connect with the story. The other aspect—and this is really when I became engaged with synthetic biology—was back in early 2008 my friend and collaborator Sascha Pohflepp heard a talk by the synthetic biologist Drew Endy and told me, “Daisy, you’re going to find this amazing—these engineers want to design biology.” That began my deep dive into the field.

I thought, “So, engineers are going to design biology using DNA as code, using it as a programming language—that’s unbelievable!” And if biology is going to become a design material, what is going to be designed, what is good design, and who will decide? If you’re thinking in this way, you can see the plant or rhino as design objects. Then how are these “things” any different than a phone or other everyday things we use? Growth Assembly (2009, with Sascha Pohflepp) ends up being a story of a response to an environmental crisis where synthetic biology has been pushed forward to the point where plants are designed, engineered, to grow useful objects. Everything is told minimally through a set of botanical drawings, setting up a world for the viewer to imagine themselves.

Your PhD dealt with the notion of better. Can you say a bit about what motivated that work? And perhaps to what degree those questions remain within your current work?

My PhD asked, “What is better?” People want the answer, and it’s impossible to give one as there isn’t “one” better. We have to do the work to discuss together what we want to be better, what are the shared values we advocate for, down to the actions that can lead us there. That said, my idea of better is to protect our shared environment. I find it hard to see anything else as the primary goal, but that is a luxury given my privileged circumstances—I have the luxury of being able to worry about my recycling, my carbon footprint, and the future. But if your primary concern is the present—of putting food on the table—the long-term future of humanity is less important. And my daily actions don’t align with my definition of better: I travel, I consume; what’s better for me in the short term differs wildly from my long-term view. But if we circle back, if there is an ethics of better defined by a common good, should that be a long-term or short-term common good? What is our duty as a species, how do we balance individual needs and planetary needs in a common good? It all becomes very messy, very quickly.

Working in synthetic biology—which led me to my PhD—I was left in the position of not knowing what my role was anymore. I was surrounded by people who wanted to make the world better, developing a technology shaped by their individual beliefs of what was better. I started off as a kind of critical agent of subterfuge, creating a space for artists and designers within synthetic biology but after ten years I had to ask, “Where am I? Have I become the poster-girl for synthetic biology – effectively promoting it?” To be critical about synthetic biology, I first had to explain to people what synthetic biology was and what it promised, and was essentially promulgating it, which became problematic for me.

The funding for my work was often from government agencies that had identified a bit of budget for artists to make work about the science being produced described as public engagement but really was about encouraging public acceptance. You can’t, then, make very critical work because it could burn bridges with the field or its funders, so it became a conflicted space for me.