A project powered by Faculty of Arts and Design, West University of Timisoara, and UVT Art Center in partnership with Ars Electronica Festival and KunstUniversität Linz
concept
Inspired by Félix Guattari’s Three Ecologies—environmental, social, and mental—Techno-Ecologies for a Fragile Earth explored curatorial practice and pedagogy as a living, responsive system that negotiates the interactions between art, technology, and ecology through an ecosophical perspective. The exhibition proposed an expanded framework of five ecologies: ecological-material, social-collaborative, mental-perceptual, techno-ecological, and eco-aesthetic. Within this model, curation and pedagogy are not static formats but adaptive organisms that breathe, sense, and evolve alongside artists, audiences, and the planet.
Produced for Ars Electronica Campus Linz 2025, the exhibition brought together four interactive installations and a selection of short films conceived as techno-organic media. Within the constellation of the five techno-ecologies, each work functioned as a node where data, light, scent, and human presence intertwined to reimagine coexistence through digital poetics and empathy.
Proposing a curatorial and pedagogical framework that weaves the affective with the algorithmic through an approach of eco-tech art pedagogy, the presentation calls for a redefinition of exhibition-making and teaching as techno-ecological acts of care. From this perspective, the exhibition shifts from depicting environmental vulnerability to enacting it as an experiential condition, generating forms of empathy, sensitivity, and active learning.
keywords
Techno-Ecology; Ecosophy and Media Ecologies; Five Ecologies Framework; Eco-Aesthetics and Empathic Practices; Curatorial Ecologies; Eco-Tech Art Pedagogy; Digital Poetics of Fragility.
Introduction: From Ecosophy to Techno-Ecologies
In our contemporary world, Techno-Ecologies for a Fragile Earth aligns with ecosophical research by expanding and operationalizing Guattari’s original triad (reference 1), where he argues for the interdependence of environmental, social, and mental dimensions within the crises of late modernity.
In dialogue with this triadic architecture, the exhibition introduces an expanded framework of five ecologies, capturing emerging modes of coexistence in an era defined by interactive technologies:
- Ecological-material ecology – resources, material environments, sustainability.
- Social-collaborative ecology – communication, propaganda, participation, social dynamics.
- Mental-perceptual ecology – perceptual navigation across real, virtual, and hybrid environments.
- Techno-ecology – human–machine interaction and technological agency.
- Eco-aesthetic ecology – sensibility, empathy, and digital poetic practices.
Recent scholarship in media studies highlights the urgency of developing frameworks that bridge technological systems with ecological thinking, from Latour’s call (reference 2) for new modes of planetary responsibility to Cubitt’s (reference 3) articulation of media as ecological infrastructures. The five ecologies framework responds to this need by offering an integrated lens through which to examine how artistic practices engage with technological mediation, multisensory perception, and environmental vulnerability. It enables the articulation of expanded curatorial and pedagogical practices that situate media art within broader socio-environmental transformations.
This expansion is both theoretical and operational: it enables the modelling of curatorial practice, artistic production, and pedagogy in line with the traditions of media ecology (Cubitt, Parikka) (references 3, 4) and technoetic arts (Ascott) (reference 5), where artistic systems are understood as hybrid organisms composed of sensory, informational, and material flows. This expanded framework speaks directly to current concerns within the ISEA community regarding the entanglement of technological systems, ecological responsibility, and multisensory modes of perception.
Curatorial Methodology: Exhibitions as Living, Eco-Technological Systems
The curatorial methodology mobilizes four primary directions:
- media ecologies – artworks function as nodes in networks of signals, data, light, and matter.
- technoetic arts – technology is approached as a cognitive and affective agent.
- eco-tech art pedagogy – learning emerges through prototyping, interactivity, and critical reflection.
- performing fragility – the exhibition does not depict climate crisis but activates it through sensory instabilities, glitches, perceptual overload, and material–digital hybridities.
Curation becomes a relational ecology in which art, technology, and environmental thinking co-produce the experience. The exhibition operates as an infrastructure of care, composed of technical processes, micro-choreographies of perception, and transdisciplinary collaborations that sustain affective and pedagogical circulation.
This approach materializes what Ascott calls “visionary pragmatism” (reference 5)—a mode of transformation through technological mediation that resonates with ecosophical thinking, where art generates sensitivity, reflection, and new imaginaries for future coexistence.
To further articulate this curatorial methodology, the exhibition framework also draws from current debates in posthumanist and new materialist theory, which position artistic practices within distributed networks of agencies. This perspective reframes the exhibition as an ecology of attention in which human and non-human forces—technical systems, digital processes, environmental cues—interact to co-construct meaning. Such an approach requires a curatorial sensitivity to the temporal behaviours of systems, the affective rhythms of interaction, and the ethical implications of working with technologies that modulate perception. By integrating these considerations, the methodology shifts from displaying works to choreographing conditions for situated, sensorimotor, and cognitive engagement.
Techno-Ecologies in Practice
The Ars Electronica 2025 catalogue (reference 6) introduces the exhibition Techno-Ecologies for a Fragile Earth concept through several generative questions:
-What if recycling could be a language of collective resistance in the face of global crisis?
-What if our senses and thoughts could decode digital illusions?
-What if techno-ecology and techno-nostalgia were the key to future sustainability?
Each of the five artworks responds to these questions, materializing one of the expanded ecologies.
Artists: Andreea Pleșa & Mihaela Vișovan
Artwork: Unsolved Patterns
Technical description:
The installation investigates environmental ecology through the recovery of textile industrial memory. By juxtaposing sewing patterns, textile scraps, and illuminated display boxes, the work reflects on the loss of craftsmanship, the devaluation of manual labour, and the excess generated by fast fashion.
Creative reuse transforms discarded materials into a poetic gesture of resistance, reactivating both material and immaterial heritage. Recycling becomes a critical and eco-aesthetic language.
Artist: Paul Babencu
Artwork: Signal Corps
Technical description:
The installation examines social ecology by interrogating the manipulation of information. Referencing the historical U.S. Army Signal Corps, the artwork recontextualizes archival materials—including resources from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum—within an interactive environment where the audience becomes co-author of its own visual propaganda. Signal distortion, image reconfiguration, and direct participation create a destabilized social ecology, demanding responsible perception within a fragile informational landscape. Such manipulation foregrounds the socio-political stakes of communication ecologies in contemporary media environments.
Artist: Bogdan Matei
Artwork: The Scent of Nothingness
Technical description:
The installation addresses mental ecology through a sensory ambiance where virtual objects coexist with real olfactory stimuli. Inspired by Philip Brey’s analysis of mixed realities, the installation induces a deliberate perceptual error, making the boundary between real and virtual permeable. Scent—the most ephemeral and affective of the senses—becomes a critical tool for navigating digital environments and recalibrating perceptual experience.
Artist: Deian Berar
Artwork: Omnilateral Dimensions
Technical description:
The installation articulates techno-ecology as an emergent space where perception, data, and imagination co-evolve. Generative forms, algorithmic structures, and reactive sound dynamics compose an unstable ecology marked by uncertainty and complexity. References to technological singularity intensify the tension between control and emergence, simulation and reality, revealing technology as an agent of reconfiguring sensibility and future sustainability.
Artists: Elena Ilin, Matei Negruțiu, Bianca Pascu, Callista Birta, Daniela A. Radu, Andrei Bucovanu, Francisco Jardim Henriques
Artwork: Techno-Nostalgia. Lost & Found
Technical description: Short film selection
Short film selection explores “techno-nostalgia” as a strategy for affective and critical recovery. The films interrogate how digital imagery transforms memory, documenting its precarity and elasticity within an affective ecology of past and future. Technology becomes an instrument of affective sustainability, generating new modes of coexistence with the histories of visual media.
Eco-Tech Art Pedagogy: Learning Through Techno-Ecologies
The pedagogical dimension is central to Techno-Ecologies for a Fragile Earth, which functioned as an eco-tech laboratory in which students and alumni worked through:
- technological prototyping (coding, sensors, reactive interfaces).
- critical reflection on media ecologies.
- interdisciplinary collaboration.
- co-creation and practices of care for environments and communities.
Activating what Ascott terms “constructive language” (reference 5), artistic pedagogy becomes a process of shaping perception and reality. It produces not only artworks but also new forms of sensibility, collaboration, and responsibility.
Beyond technical skill-building, this pedagogical model emphasizes reflective, relational, and ecological modes of learning. Students are encouraged to understand technologies not only as tools, but as environments that shape perception, agency, and collective responsibility. Workshops and prototyping sessions function as “learning ecologies,” where experimentation is accompanied by iterative critique, collaborative decision-making, and attention to the ethical and environmental implications of technological systems. This process supports the development of critical technological literacy—an essential competence for emerging artists navigating the complexities of contemporary media landscapes. By situating learning within techno-ecological contexts, the project demonstrates how pedagogy can foster resilient, imaginative, and socially responsive artistic practices.
Curating and Teaching as Techno-Ecological Care
This exhibition positions curation and pedagogy as techno-ecological practices capable of reimagining the future as a space of responsibility, creativity, and collective transformation. Techno-Ecologies for a Fragile Earth performs climate fragility through digital poetics, interactivity, and sensory experience, cultivating empathy, attentiveness, and modes of coexistence. In this framework, technology is reframed as a site of regeneration, not solely a catalyst of disruption, nurturing ecological awareness and pedagogical sensitivity while enabling emergent ways of sensing, inhabiting, and relating within techno-ecological environments.
By integrating environmental, social, perceptual, and techno-aesthetic dimensions, the project illustrates how expanded ecological frameworks can inform contemporary media art. It demonstrates that exhibitions can function not merely as display environments but as ecological systems that activate attention, care, and ethical imagination. Through this lens, media art becomes a site for rehearsing alternative futures and exploring the transformative potential of human–machine collaboration within fragile environments.
References
[1] Guattari, Félix. The Three Ecologies. London: Continuum, 2000.
[2] Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017.
[3] Cubitt, Sean. EcoMedia. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 2005.
[4] Parikka, Jussi. A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
[5] Ascott, Roy. Technoetic Arts: Art and the Matter of Consciousness. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2003.
[6] Aura Bălănescu, “Techno-Ecologies for a Fragile Earth”, concept presentation Ars Electronica Catalogue, 2025.
curator
Aura Bălănescu is a media curator, artist, and researcher whose practice explores intersections of art, technology, and ecological thinking. As a lecturer at the Faculty of Arts and Design, West University of Timișoara, she develops research-based pedagogies integrating interactive systems, biofeedback sensors, AI-generated structures, and atmospheric sensing. Through her affiliation with Tehnoarte Association, she focuses on sensory environments and expanded embodiment, treating artistic practice as a living system where bodies, materials, and technologies co-evolve.
Internationally, she has presented work at major media art forums such as ISEA International (Seoul 2025), Consciousness Reframed (Shanghai 2025), Media Art Histories symposia (Krems, Riga), as well as digital-innovation programs and interdisciplinary platforms dedicated to immersive and experimental media practices. Across her practice, she advocates for art as an interface of ecological empathy and for media technologies as agents capable of cultivating care, awareness, and relationality.
Artists
The artists participating in Techno-Ecologies for a Fragile Earth form an interdisciplinary collective of emerging practitioners, composed of students (Paul Babencu, Deian Berar, Elena Ilin, Matei Negruțiu, Bianca Pascu, Callista Birta, Daniela A. Radu, Andrei Bucovanu, Francisco Jardim Henriques) and alumni (Andreea Pleșa, Mihaela Vișovan, Bogdan Matei) of the Faculty of Arts and Design, West University of Timisoara. Their backgrounds span media art, installation, sound, performance, interactive systems, experimental image-making, and computational practices oriented toward speculative futures. They share an interest in ecological perception, sensory experimentation, and the poetic potential of technological environments.
Photo credit: Andrada Pecican, Cosmin Neață, Alexandru Tomici
team
Dean Prof. Dr. Diana Andreescu / Faculty of Arts and Design, West University of Timisoara, Center for Research and Creation in Decorative Arts and Design (CCCADD), and Creative Center of Contemporary Visual Arts (CCAVC)
Coordinating team: Techno-Ecologies for a Fragile Earth, Lect. univ. dr. Aura Bălănescu, Conf. univ. dr. Ion Gherman | Techno-Nostalgia. Lost & Found, Lect. univ. dr. Ioana Dorobantu-Gordon and Conf. univ. dr. Dan Rațiu | futureframes.tm, curators: Asist. univ. dr. Amalia Gaiță and Lector. univ. dr. Mădălin Mărienuț
Graphic design: Bogdan Matei
Technological expertise & logistics: Tehnoarte Association
resources
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