Natalie JeremijenkoKevin Berger @ Salon.com writes: “She is an intellectual and emotional storm. Her renowned public artworks are reshaping the ways we think about science. Activist, environmentalist and former rock promoter Natalie Jeremijenko turns the art world upside down.”

Jeremijenko, 39, explains that her work is “all about creating interfaces that draw people into the environment and get them to reimagine collective action.” She cracks open her laptop and displays an image of 100 polycarbonate tubes or “buoys” that she’s engineered to glow when fish swim through them in the Hudson River …. Did you know the fish were on Zoloft? All the antidepressants that New Yorkers take are flushed through their urine into sewage treatment plants, which overflow into the river …. Go to the Whitney Museum and see one of her drawings hanging on a wall by a bathroom …. It asks, “Why are the Hudson River fish and frogs on antidepressants?” Printed on it in tiny letters are actual studies that attest to the chemical drug compounds in the waterway consumed by the unsuspecting bass, sturgeon and crabs.

When the buoys light up, you can feed the fish food treated with chelating agents to help cleanse the PCBs from their blood, planted there from decades of General Electric dumping waste into the river. The fish food, in fact, will not be much different from the energy bars we’re always eating on hiking trails. “The idea that we eat the same stuff is a visceral demonstration that we live in the same system,” Jeremijenko says. “Eating together is the most intimate form of kinship. By scripting a work where we share the same kind of food with fish, I’m scripting our interrelationship with them.”

[Salon.com: Link]

Natalie Jeremijenko
Thanks, EB.

See also Natalie Jeremijenko: DARPA of Dissent