Tega Brain

In this episode of Future Form with Lauren Franco, I speak with artist and environmental engineer Tega Brain about ecology, automation, artificial intelligence, carbon accounting, and the infrastructures shaping contemporary life.Tega's work explores how technologies organize agency, distribute power, and shape our relationship to the environment. Through projects ranging from Solar Protocol, a solar-powered web hosting system, to Slop Evader, a tool for navigating the pre-ChatGPT internet, to Offset, an alternative carbon registry, she uses artistic practice to question the assumptions embedded within technical systems. We also discuss her long-running collaborative practice with artist Sam Lavigne and how humor, participation, and intervention can be used to expose the logics of contemporary technological systems.We discuss engineering and its claims to neutrality, the politics of optimization, AI and climate change, and the growing tendency to frame environmental crises as technological problems. The conversation also explores participation as a form of intervention, and what it means to design systems that work with environmental limits rather than constantly attempting to overcome them.Theme song by Yuzeren.