Nomeda Urbonas & Gediminas Urbonas

The Psychotropic House: Zooetics Pavilion of Ballardian Technologies

Installation, 2017

The Psychotropic House: Zooetics Pavilion of Ballardian Technologies is a discursive experiment that aims to articulate ‘Zooetics’—a notion in progress—and explore new ways for human knowledge and research to engage with other forms of life by imagining designs, prototypes and interfaces for future interspecies ecologies. The Zooetics Pavilion draws inspiration from the short stories found in Vermilion Sands (1971), a science fiction book by the English author J. G. Ballard that imagines a world where technological devices are alive and sentient, a world where houses, for example, are capable of responding to the emotional states of their inhabitants. Work investigates how relations between life and non-life, human and non-human, may be on the one hand unknowable, remaining unmapped by existing cartographies of knowledge, and yet at the same time necessary and unavoidable. The Zooetics Pavilion thus calls for new forms of aesthetic and scientific imagination.

Artists' bio

Artist duo Nomeda Urbonas (b. 1968, Kaunas, Lithuania) and Gediminas Urbonas (b. 1969, Vilnius, Lithuania) currently live and work in Cambridge, MA and Vilnius, Lithuania. They are artists and educators, and the co-founders of Urbonas Studio, an interdisciplinary research practice that facilitates exchange amongst diverse forms of knowledge and artistic practice in pursuit of projects that transform civic spaces and collective imaginaries. Combining different media, their work frequently involves collective activities that contribute to cross-disciplinary exchange between several nodes of knowledge production: network and participatory technologies, sensorial media and public space, environmental remediation design and spatial organization, and alternative planning integration.