Aroussiak Gabrielian is an Armenian-born, Los Angeles-based environmental designer and bioartist with training in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Media Arts. She works with living organisms, natural systems, and atmospheric phenomena to explore multispecies entanglements across scales. Her work aims to torque our imaginaries to help us rethink our interactions with both human and non-human agents on this planet. 
 
Aroussiak’s work has received numerous design recognitions including the Emerging Designer Awards from the Design Futures Initiative, the Tomorrowland Projects Foundation Award administered through the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Word Changing Ideas Awards recognized by Fast Company, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. She has exhibited internationally at various institutions, including SXSW, Ars Electronica, Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing, the Eli & Edith Broad Museum Art Lab, A+D Museum Los Angeles, the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York City, Science Gallery Detroit, among others. 
 
Aroussiak is Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture + Urbanism at the School of Architecture at USC, where she teaches design across ecologic and biologic scales. She is an Affiliate Faculty of Media Arts Practice at the School of Cinematic Arts and Founding Director of the Landscape Futures Lab, which is focused on expanding the climate imaginary. Outside of academia, Aroussiak is a member of NEW INC, the arts and technology incubator of the New Museum in New York City, a trained futurist with the Association of Professional Futurists, and Founding Design Principal of foreground design agency, a critical design practice based in Los Angeles that aims to dismantle structures of power and privilege that render specific humans, species, and matter silent. 

Lecture Abstract:

For the past five years, Gabrielian has been developing design prototypes that interrogate the position of the human in our environmental future by catalyzing new rituals that force humans out of their exploitative relationship with the more-than-human world and obligate them to collaborate and thus co-evolve toward more inclusive and ethical models for living. Through a feminist new materialist lens, and deploying arts-based research, she investigates the entanglements of human and non-human life, as well as our approach to planetary threats – challenging typical technoscientific “solutions” to environmental crises and reimagining more ethical ways forward. Her work – as executed through creative practice, written scholarship, my research lab, and teaching – aims to torque our imaginaries to help us re-think our interactions with both human and non-human agents on this planet. In this lecture, Gabrielian will present her recent creative project, writings, and work from her research lab and teaching. Together, these efforts aim to reorient our imaginaries, fostering new ways of engaging with human and non-human agents to navigate the increasing challenges of our shared planetary existence.