Molly Pluenneke
As an artist and geospatial analyst, I work within and against the empirical methodologies of resource management and environmental research. By examining the connection between ecological governance and mechanisms of control, my work demonstrates how efforts designed to protect our environment can simultaneously exploit it. Through an interdisciplinary practice that includes sculptural objects, site-specific installation, and field-based research, I investigate the politics that shape scientific knowledge and define our relationship to the natural world.
I treat analytical tools, such as geographic data and environmental monitoring devices, as artistic media rather than instruments of certainty. Through playful, darkly humorous gestures, my work mimics and misuses these tools, exposing their underlying, sometimes absurd, logic. I often exaggerate this absurdity to emphasize the tensions between scientific authority and lived ecological experience. Rather than rejecting these frameworks outright, I use their antithetical qualities to explore alternative modes of understanding. In this way, my work points to the limitations of “objective” knowledge and reflects on the broader human impulse to codify environments that are fundamentally dynamic and unknowable.
The limitations of environmental governance structures have become increasingly evident amid the climate crisis, as they often struggle to account for the magnitude and complexity of escalating ecological instability. James C. Scott, in Seeing Like a State, observes that institutions frequently seek to render complex social and ecological systems “legible” through processes of simplification and standardization. In doing so, individuals, both human and nonhuman, are reduced to traceable units. Scott’s concept of legibility suggests, that when systems of knowledge prioritize what is measurable over what is lived, they obscure the very conditions they aim to manage, and often result in more fragile, less resilient systems. In the context of climate change, the fragility of reductive systems is no longer abstract but lived, underscoring how the ways we make our environment knowable directly shape the conditions under which it is governed. In recent work, I reframe systems of scientific legibility as constructed, contingent methodologies whose claims of neutrality can be unsettled by narrative structures that displace dominant viewpoints.
In her 1988 article "Situated Knowledges," Donna Haraway advocates for a feminist approach to the sciences and introduces the concept of “situated knowledge.” She writes, “Situated knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent, not as a screen or a ground or a resource, never finally as slave to the master that closes off the dialectic in his unique agency and his authorship of ‘objective’ knowledge.” She further states, “Acknowledging the agency of the world in knowledge makes room for some unsettling possibilities, including a sense of the world’s independent sense of humor.” Drawing from Haraway’s argument, my practice positions the world as, what she calls a “witty agent,” engaging in a playful reciprocity with nature that scientific systems often overlook. Through my work, I invite viewers to reexamine their role within shared environments and to envision ecological responsibility beyond existing claims of “legibility” and “objective” measurement. In the context of the climate crisis, understanding should stem from active, collaborative encounters with the natural world, rather than from detached positions of analytical and institutional power. Haraway asserts, “only partial perspective promises objective vision.” Therefore, as our environmental landscape becomes increasingly unfamiliar and complex, adaptation and resilience demand more expansive, interdisciplinary, and collective ways of knowing that reposition our relationship to the rapidly changing ecologies of the Anthropocene.